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Alcatel-Lucent Goes SIP Crazy: Page 2 of 2

ANALYSIS What's less clear, however, is to how far Alcatel-Lucent will succeed in its SIP efforts. The OmniPCX's SIP offering is still very much a hybrid play nor are Alcatel-Lucent's voicemail systems built with SIP interfaces.

Perhaps what's most worrisome is Alcatel's ability to negotiate the interoperability issues that continue to plague SIP. As one Alcatel-Lucent employee put it to me, while there's consensus on core SIP functions there's no consensus on more advanced features, like firewall traversal or integration with Outlook. "Our SIP implementation, for example, won't work with Nokia's SIP implementation," he acknowledged.

All vendors playing in this market have a similar challenge, which is where alliances and market perception help vendors persuade third-parties to adopt their interpretation of the SIP specification. Alcatel-Lucent may face a bigger challenge than most leading players. I heard here on the floor that Attitude Telecom, for example, recently snubbed Alcatel-Lucent, and was not willing to invest the time to make its SIP implementation compatible with Alcatel-Lucent. That's doesn't bode well for the US market place where Alcatel-Lucent is even less dominant.