Trunking’s New Tricks: Exploring the Elastic Benefits of SIP Trunking
Of all the industries cloud technology has turned on an ear, telecommunications must be near the top. Once fraught with high costs, burdensome inflexibility, and endless complexity, numerous digital innovations have made internal and external communications easier and more affordable than ever. This equalizing effect has helped businesses flourish by granting cheap, easy access to solutions that were once available only to large enterprises.
The Benefits of SIP Trunking
Of the benefits SIP trunking offers, access and affordability are just the start. These are great things in an era dominated by concepts like iterative evolution: If an organization can’t change to meet the whims of a modern clientele, experience-conscious customers will gladly churn over to one that can.
With an elastic SIP trunking solution, businesses can take one of the most important aspects of their ongoing customer relationship — namely, communicating with them — and bend it to their and their clientele’s needs. Moreover, elastic SIP trunking eases the adoption of related communication technologies, further enriching the company’s ability to adapt.
Put another way, elastic SIP trunking is built for agility, and that naturally makes it a great match for the agile enterprise. Its irresistible mix of flexibility and function reflects two attributes quick-changing organizations always need more of — particularly when they’re collared by the rigidity and expense of legacy communication technologies.
SIP Trunking: A Logical First Step for Modernizing Organizations
In business, evolution is rarely easy. Adapting to customer demands on a local or regional scale can require capital and operational expenses beyond the means of many organizations. Likewise, while enterprise-level companies are more likely to have the resources needed for an effective pivot, technological inertia may result in disproportionate effort and expenditure. In either event, change can garner undue resistance from stakeholders who are used to doing things the old way.
These factors alone make a compelling business case for the benefits of elastic SIP trunking. Because the technology serves as a backbone for so many modern communication tools — and because it allows companies to integrate older tools within upgraded systems — it offers both immediate impact and high near-future potential.
The increasingly popular class of cloud communications solutions has replaced bare-bones voice- and text-based communications with a robust list of internal and customer-facing improvements, giving companies access to powerful communications APIs and other high-utility tools. As noted above, session initiation protocol (the eponymous technology behind SIP trunking) serves as the backbone of many communication technologies; it’s one of several protocols that enable rich customer engagement.
When elastic SIP is combined with communications APIs, businesses can adopt the functionality and features that are most relevant to their customers’ demands. Better yet, since SIP trunking can also be used to bring older digital communication systems into the cloud, businesses can set these events into motion without sacrificing the processes their employees rely on. As mentioned above, change is rarely easy for businesses — but it gets easier when companies can build for the future and hedge their bets in the meantime.
Exploring the Elastic Side of SIP Trunking
The benefits of SIP for the agile enterprise don’t stop there, however. While the above-mentioned perks broadly apply to all SIP solutions, the elasticity certain providers offer makes the technology more customizable while simultaneously lowering complexity and cost.
Turning back to older communications setups, rigidity is still the norm in many businesses. Companies using legacy trunking products may need to purchase a predetermined number of lines in advance. Here, “going over” may necessitate costly additional hardware, assuming expansion is possible at all. Besides requiring companies to know exactly how many lines they need, this forces organizations with variable call volumes to make an undesirable decision at best: overpaying for services they don’t always need or consistently butting against capacity at certain times of year.
Thus, a solution like elastic SIP trunking — which streamlines the line- and feature-addition processes and bills customers for only what they use — carries immediate value. Agile companies with variable volume needs get a cloud-based utility with built-in scalability and the flexibility needed to set up future upgrades. By the same token, they receive a voice solution offering reasonable billing practices, with no overhead fees or technician visits required when the company needs to surpass its usual number of trunks.
Elasticity Matters
On the topic of cloud architecture, the delivery method offers agile enterprises other benefits when they choose elastic SIP. For one example, iterative improvements are easier to implement. Instead of calling a technician to install a new feature’s physical hardware, it’s often as easy as running an update.
Similarly, outages and failovers become easier to manage. Where older SIP solutions run on a dedicated data line and outages from analog systems result in total communication blackouts, cloud delivery can often be routed to a backup data line, with many solutions boasting automatic failover — reducing outages for companies that live and die by their phones and saving stakeholders from lost sleep.
If the benefits of SIP trunking are an improvement over outdated comm tech, elastic SIP represents yet another upgrade. The technology’s scalability and cloud-based, future-focused architecture make it a lock for agile companies using a standard SIP trunking provider; meanwhile, businesses with no existing solution get the best of both worlds by choosing an elastic product.
With the operational improvements and financial efficiencies it offers, it’s only a matter of time until it becomes the standard everywhere — a refrain that should be familiar, considering how many times cloud has revolutionized telecom in recent years. For businesses focused on rapid, iterative improvement, the next step should be just as clear.
