Microsoft and Polycom today announced a joint marketing and development agreement to deliver rich media collaboration solutions. The initial offering, is scheduled for release in late 2004, and will combine the presence and IM capabilities of Microsoft’s Live Communications Server and Windows Messenger with a slew of Polycom's desktop and group video conference systems, IP phones, voice and video bridges; and the conference portal.

The solution will support SIP from infrastructure to the endpoint. Microsoft and Polycom's SIP strategy is designed to deliver a customer solution that combines the benefits of video with voice, instant messaging, applications, business processes, Web services and Web collaboration.

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SIP is all over the wires today, with Cisco’s just-announced acquisition of dynamicsoft. Fellow blogger Tom Keating has more on that item in his blog here.

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In other SIP news, BorderWare Technologies announced SIPassure, a SIP Firewall. SIPassure is a hardware device designed to manage and protects the flow of VoIP-specific SIP communications, and will be available in two models, an enterprise and a carrier model.

Developed over the past 12 months and designed to sit alongside SIP-based IP PBXs such as Cisco CallManager and Avaya Communications Manager, SIPassure deploys at the network edge or in the DMZ and manages all inbound and outbound SIP sessions.

According to the company’s news release, SIPassure:
• prevents voice spam, DoS/DDoS protection (RTP, SIP REGISTRAR), voice mail bombing (vbomb) and packet-level intrusion prevention
• provides robust firewall features including stateful inspection with policy-based packet filtering and SIP and RTP message validation
• functions as a SIP proxy server, redirect server, and registrar server (IETF RFC 3261)
• functions as an incoming and outgoing proxy, providing integrity checks for malformed SIP messages, ensuring that only correctly formatted messages are forwarded
• provides NAT (Network Address Translation) and firewall traversal (RTP proxy)
• includes comprehensive reporting and auditing
• supports SNMP for integration with network management frameworks (i.e. HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, etc.)