VCON Adds SIP Support To Its Video-Over-IP PBX

Slated to ship early in the third quarter, Media Xchange Manager (MXM) 3.0, VCON's IP video PBX, will provide management and video telephony features such as call transfer and call forwarding to SIP-based video end points, said Gordon Daugherty, president of VCON, based here.

SIP, which is used to establish connections between devices during IP voice or video calls, already is gaining traction in the convergence market among IP telephony vendors as a competing standard to H.323, currently the staple protocol for delivering video over ISDN, Daugherty said. For now, the two standards will co-exist, but it's unclear which IP protocol will eventually win out,a determination that's likely to take several years, he said.

"Don't be fearful of deploying H.323-based video today, because if the market suddenly shifts to SIP, you're not going to have to throw everything away," Daugherty said.

Although most videoconferencing end points currently support the H.323 standard, several vendors have incorporated SIP into their product road maps, said George-Erick Brinckmann, president of Brinckmann and Associates, an Atlanta-based solution provider. IP video PBX vendors such as VCON must show support for SIP before it gains widespread customer use, he said.

"Until we have a robust management tool like MXM, it won't matter if we have SIP on end points," Brinckmann said.

Microsoft has thrown its support behind the SIP standard by using it as the underlying protocol for the Windows Messenger instant-messaging feature in its Windows XP operating system, Daugherty said.

VCON's plan to support SIP-based videoconferencing should help eliminate obstacles solution providers face when working with video-over-IP, said Christine Perey, president of research firm Perey Research and Consulting.

"[Solution providers can't afford to become experts in multiple protocols and to support competing lines of technology," Perey said.