Over the past few years the Session Border Control market has seen some change. At the high end of the market there are companies like Acme Packet and Nextone. These companies generally focus on features, features oh and more features. In fact a recent meeting with Seamus Hourihan of Acme Packet was one of the most information-packed discussions I have ever had. For about 40 minutes, Seamus focused on feature after feature being added to their SBC solution. The new announcements were quite impressive and likely intimidating to the competition.

 

But while companies like Acme Packet have done a great job of creating a nice barrier to entry in the high end of the market, other companies are effectively focusing on providing solutions for smaller corporations and service providers.

 

Case in point is Borderware. Recently I spent some time with Jeff Carr the company’s VP and General Manager of the SIP Solutions Group and he shared with me how his company has been very successful selling SBC solutions to network equipment providers (NEPs) and OEMs this past year.

 

Their solution is like a purpose-built switch for SIP and VoIP. For carriers this is a great solution. When it comes to NEPs like Mitel they are working with such companies to integrate their solutions into NEP applications.

 

Jeff tells me the message my readers should leave with is Borderware is the company offering a more flexible and cost-effective SBC solution. So while competitive products could have entry costs of $100k their solution starts at $5,000 and can scale to 40,000 concurrent sessions.

 

Of course you will give up some features and functionality but you might be surprised to learn performance is something you may not give up at all. Why? Well you see the Borderware solution is based on software and more specifically runs on Solaris and can utilize Intel or Sparc processors.

 

Using commercial off the shelf technology (COTS) such as this you get the same performance at one fifth the cost according to Carr. Most importantly, his company is not in the hardware business and you are free to run your SBC on the hardware you see fit.

 

There are immense benefits to software-based SBC solutions as they give you the flexibility to choose the platform you want to run on and you are able to scale the solution with a curve directly correlating to Moore’s Law. As an entry-level SBC with the added benefit of choosing your own hardware, Borderware is worth a close look.