SIP trunking has emerged over the past five years as an attractive way for organizations to lower overall calling costs while also centralizing communications for their business. The demand to support an increasingly mobile and remote workforce has driven a strong interest in SIP trunking as a means to connect employees worldwide through a single communications network. Add in the disaster recovery benefits that SIP trunks provide and you see why so many organizations have adopted this technology.

A recent survey from The SIP School shows that more than 40 percent of the organizations polled are leveraging SIP trunks in their business already. Nearly 18 percent more are actively researching or testing SIP trunking with two percent ready to buy.

A large chunk of the survey included SIP trunk service providers, leaving fewer than four percent of the respondents who are not currently using SIP trunks or even considering them. That feels like a tipping point!

And as organizations increasingly adopt SIP trunking, maximizing the benefits of this technology becomes a top priority. The SIP School notes in its survey report that “SIP trunking is not always an easy service to implement and sometimes not easy to support if things go wrong.”

But what can organizations do to ensure they get the most out of their SIP trunking solution? Interoperability testing is an important step in verifying that a SIP trunk solution will work with the organization’s communications infrastructure, while also giving insight for ways to get the most value. In fact independent testing of SIP trunk solutions – or any key technology for that matter – is a strategic part of the process.

Too often executives view testing as an end-of-project-lifecycle task – something to check off that shows it actually works. In fact, testing is more central to the process and has the ability to do more than just prove or verify that a solution can work. If done correctly, testing can deliver valuable insight that can further improve deployment success.

“Many responses to the survey point to problems for which there is technically no excuse. Things like codecs, audio paths and registration procedures are not rocket science,” said Chakra DeValla, CEO of tekVizion, in the report. “The true root cause of deployments not working is ultimately due to lack of proper testing and documentation, thinly stretched technical resources, the sheer number of options and variation even within a single vendors’ product offerings, plus the rate at which vendors introduce new features.”

And while we know that the proliferation of new features is not likely to slow anytime soon, nor can we rely on relief for thinly stretched technical resources, organizations can and should be testing their solutions regularly to ensure a successful deployment that delivers maximum value. An increasing number of service providers are independently verifying SIP trunking and other tech solutions through third party testing. So are many PBX vendors.

“The leading SIP trunking providers are coming to us to perform interoperability testing and provide detailed documentation for various PBX/SBC configurations. In many cases this is on top of the basic testing they may perform in-house. They recognize the value of having their SIP trunk configurations independently and extensively verified,” said DeValla.

The question enterprise customers should be asking is if the service provider has independently validated its SIP trunking solution for the customer’s specific IT requirements. Each organization has its own unique IT infrastructure, which is often a blend of technologies from multiple vendors. It is important to understand that a new solution will work effectively, and even optimally with the current configuration. Given the many benefits SIP trunking delivers, why not get the most value out of your investment?

Click here to see the full SIP Survey 2015 from The SIP School