 do platform vendors have to worry about soft phones dis- placing their high-dollar hard phones, they have to worry about losing market share to some other open-source provider or to Microsoft. Currently, SIP has no video specifications. When a vendor states that it uses SIP for video, it only means SIP is used for the signaling; it does not imply interoperabil- ity with other SIP video clients. In the near term, desktop video will be dominated by SIP-based endpoints, while the traditional group conferencing market will remain H.323 based; they will meet through SIP-to-H.323 gateways, as needed. The SIP Forum (www.sipforum.org) and the IETF SIP protocol process are making it possible for many new SIP-based products to enter the market. SIP could disrupt the handset business, blurring the distinction between desk phones and mobiles because SIP can cross many boundaries, including desk phones, mobiles, PCs, PDAs, soft phones, intelligent appliances, and wearables. SIP's Strengths and Weaknesses SIP's strengths include tremendous industry support and widespread development. SIP soft phones, Ethernet phones, and application servers are available to integrate with IP clients and IM. SIP facilitates application development, and minimal call state duration is maintained in the net- work. SIP is central to all the latest solutions for telephony, ranging from hosted services to proprietary platforms, from handsets to soft phones to open-source soft- ware. The concepts behind SIP are disruptive and much more dramatic than VoIP on its own. The IETF still has a substantial amount of work to do to replicate in SIP the hundreds of TDM PBX calling features, but SIP is not just telephony: It involves many applications, such as presence, that enable capabilities that are not possible in the TDM world. One shortcoming of SIP is a shortage of commercial and large-scale deploy- ments at this time, resulting in a lack of real-world experience. Another problem is the lack of call state in the network, which affects billing and securit