”In order to benefit from the advanced applications delivered by next-generation telephony platforms, enterprises are choosing to upgrade their legacy end points with high-tech IP ones,” notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Laura Devoto.
To address the growing demand, end-point vendors have been working towards granting a better integration of multiple applications to add value to the business processes by developing technology that provides enterprise customers with productivity-enhancing applications and easy-to-use-and-deploy devices.
Desk phone developers have invested time and resources in mastering devices for the multiple roles within companies. In addition, end points that support extensible markup language (XML) and telephony application programming interface (TAPI) applications are gaining traction as these enable independent developers as well as companies themselves to develop customized applications.
However, current market leaders are facing the consolidation of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an industry standard for multimedia applications. For the time being, the standard only supports the basic telephony features. Therefore, in order to grant all the features that the platform supports, most vendors have extended the protocol to create „proprietary versions of SIP” or have chosen to support basic SIP and their own proprietary protocols in their platforms.
Consequently, most of the enterprises deploying a telephony system choose to deploy the same vendors end points. However, as the standard matures, it will support more of these advanced telephony features that proprietary protocols support and SIP end points will become more functional in third- party platforms.
”As the SIP standard consolidates, IP telephony end-point vendors will face a stronger competition by affordable SIP-based solutions” explains Laura Devoto. „These devices are likely to grant more of the advanced features supported by proprietary protocols nowadays.”
”Companies can differentiate from its competitors by focusing on developing high-tech advanced-featured devices,” explains Devoto. „Providing an enhanced communication experience along with different value proposition by using either proprietary protocols or adapted versions of SIP can prove to be the key differentiator in this market.”
