Session Border Controller Featured Article

December 08, 2012


TMCnet Session Border Controller Week in Review


By Rich Steeves
TMCnet Web Editor

Oftentimes, we take for granted important pieces of technology that work behind the scenes. We may not appreciate, say, our water heater until it goes on the fritz and we have to take a cold shower. The same might be said for a session border controller. When we are implementing unified communications technology in a SIP trunking environment, the session border controller is a vital piece of the deployment, for interoperability and security purposes. This week there was a lot of news from this space. Here are some of the highlights.


First came an article that discussed the role of a session border controller in a multi-vendor communication environment. This was the second in a series of articles on this topic, and it featured insight from industry analyst Peter Bernstein. Bernstein talked about how companies need to be competitive, flexible and agile, moving to an all-IP communications format. He points out that session border controllers allow for interoperability and help companies get the most out of their SIP trunks.

Also this week, a report came out explaining that unified communications can play an important role in closing the productivity gap for mobile workers. The study, “Mobile Unified Communications: The Emergence of 4D Convergence (News - Alert),” stated that enterprises can recoup up to $5,000 in annual productivity losses per employee by using mobile unified communications solutions. "Enabling mobility across the enterprise should be the first consideration as companies plan their UC deployments and that means having a robust, open-standard, SIP-based communications architecture in place that can support employees no matter where they are or what device they use,” said Wes Durow, vice president of Global Marketing at Sonus Networks (News - Alert).

Finally came a story about how enterprises are moving toward Software-as-a-Service options. SaaS provides the right motivations for steering IT toward service-centric models, according to an article in Microsoft’s (News - Alert) MSDN library. "Spending in 2012 is anticipated to focus on industry-specific applications; upgrades to established, mission-critical software; integrating and securing established systems and infrastructure; and software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) deployments representing extensions to, or replacement of, existing applications and new solutions,” said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner (News - Alert), in a statement on a report about enterprise application spending.

There you have it! It’s been a busy and exciting week in the session border controller space. Check back often to see more news and information!

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Solution Corner

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