Is SIP necessary for a full-functioning unified communications (UC) solution?

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While Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is not mandatory, it is the de facto standard in use today. Implementations that utilize proprietary signaling mechanisms provide little flexibility for customers and often end up locking customers into a single vendor solution. SIP fosters a great deal of interoperability which allows customers a high degree of flexibility and choice when building their unified communications (UC) architecture.

Without SIP, customers are most certainly implementing aspects of their UC infrastructure with proprietary or specialized components. Customers need to view their UC implementation as a strategic imperative and not as a tactical short term project. The degree with which a customer has an open standards-based implementation will dictate the choices they will have in terms of business process integration, third party application implementation, management tools and endpoint use. SIP is a key to enabling this flexibility.