Session border controllers were a hot topic at this week’s VON show in Santa Clara, with a variety of vendors in the space adding new capabilities and customers, talk about how other equipment providers might move into this space, and questions about what combinations of session border controller and other vendors the industry might see going forward.
Key players in the session border control space at this point include Acme Packet, Jasomi Networks, Kagoor Networks, Newport Networks Ltd. and NexTone Communications. Also, softswitch vendor Sonus Networks recently added what it says are session border control functions to its product.
In further evidence that session controller functionality is expected to be just one feature of more extensive solutions going forward, Jasomi Networks at VON gave the first demonstrations of an embeddable version of its PeerPoint solution. The embedded edition is targeted at vendors of softswitches, gateways, firewalls and IP PBXs that want to embed session border controller functionality inside their products.
The session border controller space is likely to see big changes in the near future, as larger VoIP equipment providers move to purchase these smaller, specialized companies and softswitch vendors like Telica Inc. follow the lead of Sonus and look to bring session border control functionality into their products through internal work or some form of partnership.
“The Nortels, Siemens, Alcatels are starting to figure out how they’re going to play in the market,” says Christine Hartman, vice president of VoIP markets for Probe Group. “I think we will see some acquisitions of session border control vendors by larger vendors this year or early next. The market is going to start shaking out because companies like MCI are going to start putting out RFPs” and are looking for total solutions and economies of scale.
“The incumbent [vendors] are going to have to get into this, but they’re getting into this kicking and screaming because they an existing business for media gateways,” adds Hartman, who says that session border controllers sell for about half that of media gateways.
Of course, media gateways handle IP to TDM conversion and vice versa, while session border controllers manage the hand-off of IP traffic between enterprise and service provider networks or between different service provider networks. But Hartman says VoIP communications are becoming wide spread enough that service providers want to do direct IP handoffs of their traffic without having to go back through the TDM-based PSTN, so media gateways and session border controllers have in effect become competing products.
Session border controllers are also considered competing products in some aspects to the SIP-based firewalls offered by Intertex and Ingate, which Intertex owns most of, says Intertex President Karl Erik Stahl. But Stahl says the session border controllers “create borders rather than removing them.” Ingate CEO Olle Westerberg adds that it doesn’t make sense for softswitch vendors to include session border controller functionality in their products since you can’t manage borders from a softswitch. He adds that session border controllers are also generally less secure than SIP-based firewalls.
The comments of Stahl and Westerberg get to the heart of another discussion circulating at VON, which was exactly what are session border controllers and what functionality do they offer. This issue sparked a lively debate during one of the VON sessions, Stahl says.
In other session border controller news at VON, Acme Packet unveiled Net-Net PAC, a solution for large-scale Tier 1 service provider deployments. It includes up to nine 1U session border controllers, which can perform as one logical session border controller. The company says this scales from two times to eight times that of its current Net-to-Net session Director performance and capacity.
Also at VON, Acme Packet announced it has added VoIP pioneer VocalTec to its list of resellers.
Meanwhile, NEC Corp. announced it will be reselling the Kagoor products through a new deal between the companies.
And Jasomi launched enhanced mid-call media encryption; extension of call logging (to allow per call log control across a network of PeerPoint units to meet CALEA and SEC auditing regulations); and improved protocol repair, hot failover support, SOCKS5 proxy support for its PeerPoint product. Jasomi at the show also announced it has added Packetalk, which is using PeerPoint NAT traversal solution for VoIP, to its list of customers.
While NexTone announced PointOne is using its equipment.
