I'm here at ITExpo East 2012 in the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami Beach, FL (yes, someone has to pull this duty) and we just finished up the opening panel titled:

“E-SBCs: Handling Users, Applications and Enterprise Networks"

Joining me on the panel was a group of esteemed group of competitors, sharing our respective thoughts on Enterprise Session Border Controllers, their role in today's network and the future. Here's a quick summary of what we discussed:

What are the barriers that have held back further SIP implementations and E-SBCs? - education, awareness and organizational issues between the telecommunications and networking expertise within businesses.

What drives the adoption of E-SBCs?  Security (worry about a security attack or breach), but interoperability seems to be the widest need for E-SBCs.  Many UC applications need some SIP format manipulation to facilitate communications.

Miki form Sonus speculated that with the new SIP Trunking offerings coming from the tier 1 service providers, we'll see a greater need for interop and E-SBCs.

We discussed the interoperability issue, from both a technical and business perspective - fixing SIP messages and allowing existing systems from different vendors allows a more "migratory" path, avoiding a rip-and-replace event and the expenses incurred.

Next we moved on to the issue of federation and business-level peering.  We at AudioCodes have federated with a number of our partners, suppliers and customers.  The experience changes the way you work and allows you to instant message, see presence and share your desktop with those you federate with very easily.  Expect E-SBCs to be an active enabler to federation and peering.

At the request of a session attendee, we also spent some time discussing reliability and issues that result in a single-point of failure.  The panel agreed that both HA pairing and Branch Office Appliances were available and part of the solution.

As a final topic, we looked ahead and it was agreed that federation/peering will be transformational to businesses and E-SBCs.

Plenty more going on this week - I'll be sure to share the highlights (and save the low-lights).