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A few years back, CBeyond CTO Chris Gatch, a pioneer in SIP Trunking, famously said that using an IP PBX with TDM PRI circuits was “like driving a Ferrari on a dirt road.”

I thought about Chris’s comments this week when Sprint announced that their SIP Trunking solution (BroadWorks-powered), now generally available to business customers, is certified with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2.

OCS by itself brings communications productivity to businesses – but that productivity is stymied if you’re running your business through a “dirt road” TDM circuit. By complementing OCS with BroadWorks-based SIP trunks, Sprint allows enterprises to reduce operational costs, and reduce and consolidate equipment across the organization.

But – those are really operational and cost benefits of SIP trunking. That’s certainly substantial and appealing – but it’s only half of the story. If you read past the release’s comments on cost savings, and note their focus on wireline/wireless integration, check out Sprint’s Seamless Enterprise blog, and their Convergence portal – it’s great to see that Sprint is focusing on the UC/functionality aspects of SIP Trunking, not just the cost savings.

This certainly resonates with us – one of the themes we keep coming back to at BroadSoft is that we’re seeing the industry shift to a second generation of SIP Trunking– initial releases of SIP Trunking were all about integrated access and cost reduction, without a lot of differentiation, which is a recipe for fast market commoditization. (I suppose that’s sort of like putting fancy streetlights on a dirt road. It may look a little nicer – but it’s still a dirt road.) But now we’re seeing service providers “UC-enable” their SIP Trunks – add network functionality like mobile integration, video, business process services – and it’s nice to see Sprint push this in the market.

And since we’re talking about customers who benefit from UC services, it’s worth noting that BroadSoft’s “UC in the Cloud” solutions are stronger than ever. For businesses who want UC, but don’t want, don’t need, or can’t handle the process, overhead, and maintenance of premises-based systems, BroadSoft’s “Hosted UC” solution with Microsoft just celebrated its first year on the market, and is deployed live in every region of the world. We remain extremely excited about this solution – for economic, technology, demographic, and business strategy reasons, Hosted UC and Cloud Communications in general is hotter than ever. (Even the US federal government is hot on cloud communications, a sure sign that this has hit the mainstream.)

So – to service providers – you’ll come across customers where you’ll provide UC in a fully hosted model, and you’ll come across customers with premises UC systems where you’ll provide additional UC functionality “in the cloud”. You’ll see both scenarios – but your BroadWorks system will let you attack and monetize both.