ATLANTA -- Supercomm 2003 – Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) continues to hold onto its proprietary protocol for routing voice calls over the Internet, much to the irritation of many folk in the VOIP community who believe its position is detrimental to the progress of the industry.

Cisco does support SIP (session initiation protocol), the emerging industry standard for setting up and tearing down voice calls over the Internet, but it also supports its own proprietary version, SCCP (Skinny Client Control Protocol) -- or skinny in cunning industry parlance.

Cisco claims it developed skinny back in the late 90s before SIP was up to the job, as customers needed something that worked. Analysts say this is debatable, given the meager number of enterprises that have actually deployed SIP networks. Frost & Sullivan estimates that, by the end of 2002, only 3 million office phones based on Internet technology had been sold globally.

”Still they own 45 percent of the VOIP market today, and of course they want to hold on to their investment in it,” says Vijay Bhagavath, analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “It means Cisco IP phones only work with Cisco VOIP network equipment, and they can lock in the customer.”

Cisco insists this is not the case...

Get the rest at: Boardwatch.

— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Boardwatch