You have no doubt noticed how traditional information technology vendors have embraced communications in response to customers who are looking for integrated and cost-effective solutions which span both markets. This thought occurred to me during a conversation with Mark Goodman, VP of Marketing for Ecessa a company focusing on “Uptime for IP networks,” according to Goodman.<\/p>\n
Last year the company quietly changed its name from Astrocom and even if you haven’t heard of either company it is worth looking at their products as they solve real-world corporate problems such as security through their ShieldLink<\/a> family which takes the company’s PowerLink<\/a> line of load balancing WAN optimization controllers and adds VPN gateway and firewall capabilities.<\/p>\n More recently the company announced ClariLink<\/a> which takes ShieldLink and adds a SIP proxy, registrar and SBC allowing real-time failover for SIP sessions going over IP networks. Goodman explains you don’t need service provider peering relationships or BGP with this solution and this saves you money.<\/p>\n Instead, the company uses NAT to traverse the network and their SIP proxy alleviates the double NATing problem which plagued enterprise VoIP in the good old days.<\/p>\n It is worth clarifying that one benefit of using this solution is there is no session loss if a WAN link goes down.<\/p>\n The product line is peripherally competitive to Acme Packet but there is more of a focus on smaller companies which correspond to the company’s recent Covergence acquisition<\/a>. Ingate would be another competitor to the product family as well. A recent announcement at Interop is that these appliances are getting scaled up to a 500 model which joins the family of 50 and 25. Higher model numbers allow a larger number of supported simultaneous sessions and capacity and the 500 model can support one million concurrent sessions and has gigabit throughput.<\/p>\n As IP communications gains even more traction in the enterprise we can expect more products which are aimed at helping companies consolidate multiple disparate functions into single-appliance, single-server or single-vendor solutions.<\/p>\n