Vendor Showdowns |
Welcome to Vendor Showdowns, the place where vendor's will be
scrutinized heavily against topics such as: VoIP offerings, pricing,
security, architecture, protocols, and many more. We hope to keep this
section alive by input from you the community. Feedback is most
appreciated as we can tackle the topics that you want to read - We do not want to spend time
writing stories for no one. Check it out at BleedingVoIP Showdows. In today's VoIP landscape, there are a variety of VoIP vendors. Some have been around since the pinoeering days of VoIP, some have died off. Those that still remain are divided into two categories - BIG and small. Each offers unqiue products and approaches to deliver secure and robust VoIP services across market segments. Let's take a look at the big players followed by the smaller guys. BIG FISH The Word: One of the pioneers of VoIP, Cisco Systems has been developing a and deploying VoIP products to market since the late 90's. Their flagship products incluude the CallManager, Unified Communciation platform and Unity platforms. Cisco tends to take a very distributed approach to VoIP arhcitecture and that is exaclty where we will find some security/architectural misnomers. Cisco uses the Skinny (SCCP) protocol for the majority of signaling and communication interfaces, however announcements have been made to a move to SIP. We will expose it and break it where we can. Cisco is by far the market leader overall in the United States.
The Word: The pioneers of the DMS switch, Nortel has recently accelerated its VoIP products solutions with the CS1000, MCS and CS2000 products. They also partner with Microsoft, which leads me to believe that either Nortel will die or Microsft will inhale them. Nortel uses a proprietary protocol called UNISTim for the majority of signaling and communication interfaces, however announcements have been made to a move to SIP. They are second in the market in the United States, but far behind Cisco.
The Word: Recently acquired by private equity firms Avaya is third in the market in the United States to deliver VoIP solutions. Their primary product is the Communication Manager. Avaya uses SIP and H323 protocol predominantly. We will dive deep and see how its all works, and where it just might crack.
The Word: A fairly new player in the VoIP space that is poised to disrupt the market with its expertise in software that will attempt to displace the traditional, "hardware centric" view of the VoIP solutions with a software based architecture platform. Microsoft uses a "proprietary" version of SIP that extends the base RFC specification. In my opinion, Microsoft will take over as they own 90% of the endpoint clients worldwide. 90% of endpoints = market leader eventually.
The Word: Alcatel offers VoIP solutions similar to the aformentioned but focuses predominantly in the European markets. Their solutions revovle arounf the OmniPCX platform. H323 is the primary protocol of choice, however SIP is also used. We will deconstruct their product solution from as many angles as we can get our hands on; expect exciting things.
SMALL FISH The word: Mitel provides VoIP solutions centered around the SX products that can scale to large-mdeium size enterprises. Their main protocol is SIP. We'll take a look to uncover what SIP it really is.
The word: Shoretel offers VoIP solutions around the ShoreGear and ShoreWare products. They are a fairly good sized company focused on a very distributed model. Their primary protocol is SIP. This definitely peaks my interest, as we will look deep to oncover all the goodies. The word: Digum is simple, take opensource to commercial market. They offer commercial version of the Asteisk PBX software tha thas taken the open community by storm allowing for the embrace of cost-effective VoIP across various business sizes. The primary protocol of use is AIX, however they support most if not all of the proprietary vendor's protocols at the basic level, creating very compelling unified platofrm for hosting heterogenous VoIP solutions. In my opinion, Digium is on the right track to become a major player in the VoIP space. Given enough time, Asterisk will no longer associated with some quirky VoIP platform, but will be synonymous with VoIP solutions from the larger players.
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