Session border controller (SBC) customers factor in many things before buying. Just think about it... the current SBC vendor; the provider a trusted VAR proposes; the SBC other IT managers recommend, as we discussed in last week's No Jitter piece, "3 SBC Vendors Get Customer High Fives." It's a long and inexact list.
Of the many things customers roll into an SBC buying decision, value is near the top of the list. It encompasses the technology, the purchase experience, after-sale support, and so much more. So, value is really a proxy for many measures of customer satisfaction. Therefore, when Dialogic and Huawei are accorded first place for SBC value, this is a significant customer accolade.
Why customers? The best judge of value is someone who has already taken the journey. A satisfied or dissatisfied customer is an oracle, there to inform newcomers what to expect.
In a new study of 3,000 IT managers, Eastern Management Group asked companies to evaluate their SBC providers on value and other measurements. Dialogic and Huawei both came in first for best value in SBCs.
Eastern Management Group's 18-month SBC study put 14 vendors, including Dialogic and Huawei, under the microscope. All 14 companies are important players in the world market for SBCs.
Dialogic: High-Performance Value
This software-centric company has operations in 25 countries and good distribution across North America, EMEA, LATAM, AND APAC. The company's customers are service providers and enterprises from 10 to more than 20,000 employees.
Dialogic has re-architected the SBC product portfolio from a hardware-centric solution to a software-only, cloud-native architecture in line with the company vision. With a virtual solution, customers can deploy a BorderNet SBC on premises, in public and private clouds, and in hybrid environments.
Dialogic's newest BorderNet release, version 3.7.5, adds improved management capabilities and other key features to the company's virtualized SBC, which delivers high performance, interworking, ease of use, security, and advanced routing in an all-software solution. The product scales from 25 to 100,000 sessions per instance.
Huawei: Good Value for the Money
Huawei scored well in several areas of Eastern Management Group's study -- and it's not surprising to our analysts that it rated so highly with customers.
In an interview we conducted with one Huawei service provider customer, to discuss value, the company lavished praise on Huawei for its 15% cheaper price tag -- and equally to the busload of Huawei R&D engineers who appeared at the service provider's doorstep to architect the network application.
Huawei is a multibillion-dollar communications company, growing at a 15% annual pace (1H2018). The business operates in 170 countries. Sales are well-balanced across three customer segments: SMB, enterprise, and service providers.
Worldwide, Huawei turns in strong performance in Fortune 500 Global companies. It focuses on the healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, and transportation industry markets. Service providers also represent a large Huawei customer base, and Huawei has many tier-one customers including BT, Vodafone, and Orange. Getting a foothold in the U.S. market should be a high priority for Huawei. We have recently observed the company actively participating in shows, including Enterprise Connect 2018.
Huawei's SE 1000 Series Enterprise SBC is for small, mid-market, and enterprise customers. It comes in two flavors, the E300 and the E600. The product is industrial-strength with a capability for 25 to 5,000 concurrent calls. Its muscle comes from having been built on Huawei's RH1288 server platform and capitalizes on Huawei's experience in core networks, IP, and security protection.
More Customer Satisfaction Measurements
In the next No Jitter post, I'll examine another customer satisfaction measurement, purchase experience. Customers like being courted, and that goes for SBCs. We surveyed 3,000 of them and came away with some four-star winners.
This is Eastern Management Group's fourth customer satisfaction study of SIP technology providers within the past year. Other subjects have been SIP trunks, VoIP phones, and PBXs. More information about the report "2018 Session Border Controller SBC Customer Satisfaction" is available from Eastern Management Group. For questions about the SBC customer satisfaction study and report please ask our researchers or contact John Malone.
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