The fact that many companies are adopting Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) also means that there are many VoIP services fighting over the market. This has led to various protocols, packages, and services that are sometimes incompatible with each other. This issue had been a major concern for small businesses. While they may want to adopt VoIP for their communication needs, due to their cheaper costs, these compatibility issues hinder them from fully entrusting their operations to such a service.
Recently though, a bright spot has appeared for VoIP compatibility and interoperability. Last fall during the Astricon event, the official conference for the Asterisk PBX and telephony platform, Stefan Oberg, Skype’s Vice-President for Business, announced the launch of a development program with Digium (the developers of Asterisk). This breakthrough partnership aims to incorporate Skype with the Asterisk system. They aimed to develop a way to make the Asterisk PBX handle Skype calls more clearly and efficiently as if they are simply Asterisk calls.
Digium has recently provided updates regarding this partnership with Skype. The post mentioned how clients who would use this service would now have the capability to make and receive Skype calls from within their existing Asterisk software and hardware systems. These features are on top of the base capabilities that the Asterisk PBX already has.
This partnership between two well-known VoIP providers is a prime example of the growing interoperability between the various VoIP systems. A small business owner can become more at ease in knowing that despite the multitude of both open source and proprietary voice codecs available in the market, there are efforts to be able to connect them to one another.
These moves towards partnerships and idea and technology sharing only bode well for the goal of interoperability between Voice over Internet Protocol systems.
