Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are a hot product category right now. In his Enterprise Connect keynote address, Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy cited statistics that pegged this product segment as a $2.2 billion market, growing 42% annually. One of the leaders in this space, Acme Packet, has become an investors' darling, its stock price rocketing from about $17 a share to over $75 in the last 12 months.
The latest company to announce a plan to grab a piece of the SBC market is Sipera, which up until now has been focused on security appliances and services. On the Enterprise Connect show floor, I met with Adam Boone, Sipera's marketing VP, and he explained how Sipera's approach to the SBC's scale--and, importantly, its pricing--will differ from what the market has seen so far.
Sipera claims that its new product, called E-SBC, will be priced at "as little as 10% of the cost of the market-leading carrier-focused SBCs.
That distinction about "carrier-focused" SBCs is important because the SBC started out as a device that carriers deployed at their demarcs with other carriers, so they had to scale way up and were correspondingly priced.
The SBC has two main functions, Adam Boone told me: Security and session management. In the carrier environment, the latter is its most important role, while for the enterprise, security should carry greater emphasis. "It really is protecting [the carrier's] chief asset, which is the network. In the enterprise, the critical asset is the information that runs on the network.
So Sipera built the E-SBC to scale down to as few as 20 concurrent sessions, a size that can serve 100 users; it can go as high as 10,000 concurrent sessions. Sipera sees the low price point for session management as the hook that gets the enterprise to implement E-SBCs everywhere; adding security functionality like compliance, protection against inbound threats and policy enforcement is where Sipera will make its money via the value-add, according to Boone.
"We believe the SBC [by itself] should be almost free," Boone said.
SIP Trunking continued to be a hot topic at Enterprise Connect this year, as it was in past years at VoiceCons. The session rooms were packed for our tutorials and Deep Dive sessions on technology implementation and service procurement. Even on Thursday morning of the conference, when many attendees and exhibitors have already cleared out, our informal "Coffee Talk" discussion was standing-room-only.
SBCs are a big part of the SIP Trunking story; they're the border elements that manage SIP trunks. This slideshow excerpts slides that were delivered as part of the Enterprise Connect tutorial on SIP Trunking Implementation; the slides give some useful bullet points on how to procure SBCs.
Over the past several years, Sipera's gained a solid reputation as a security company. Getting into the SBC market was a natural and smart move for them--and hey, they've even got "SIP" in their name.
