There was a lot of excitement about Yahoo and Microsoft coming together and making their IM network inter-operable and also enable Voice-over-IM between the two networks. While, that might may happen sometime in the future, today’s announcement by Communigate, a Mill Valley, California based email server maker gives me hope about the future of SIP-based VoIP. Why? Thom O’Connor, Director, Product Architecture of CommuniGate Systems explains, in their new server (version 5.0) the folks can finally use email addresses to make VoIP connections with each other. “It is inevitable that the closed-network model we are seeing in the market today for IM and VoIP will make way for standards-based interoperability. With CommuniGate Pro, all users can use the same address for email, IM, voice, and video,” he says. Communigate’s customers are large internet service providers such as Tele2 and Tucows.com. “They will roll out VoIP, which is based on our product,” says O’Connor. Communigate users can now use any SIP compatible soft-client.
That is great news. We currently use a kludge of assigning each of our SIP end-devices a fictitious 9 digit number that has no relation what-so-ever to the user. So our users have to remember or pass around numbers to their contacts. Using existing email addresses helps users as there is one less address to remember. Kudos to them.