Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) trunking is on the rise in North America, particularly with the growth in cloud telephony and managed services. This makes the role of the session border controller (SBC) extremely important as enterprises from small to large move further into the cloud for their applications and services.

TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani got to speak to Edgewater Networks, Inc. about what differentiates their SBCs from other offerings in an ever competitive and growing market. The interview was part of the On the Road Series in San Jose, CA (News - Alert).

According to Dave Martin, VP of marketing at Edgewater, as real-time voice and video communications become more prevalent in the enterprise, they demand a certain level of service and care. "There's a recognition that you really need to provide an optimized handling of voice and video sessions," he said.

Edgewater takes a unique approach with its SBC products, offering connectivity, protecting infrastructure, optimizing sessions and providing infrastructure monitoring. This gives customers visibility into the performance of their networks, making the SBC a valuable tool instead of just a means of connectivity.

"When folks are examining session border controllers they're looking to solve an initial pain point, and usually it's connectivity," said Martin. "They want to make sure their PBX (News - Alert) works with the SIP trunk provider or that they can easily connect remote workers into their headquarters' PBX system." He said that once the connectivity issue is solved, infrastructure issues will ultimately follow.

Edgewater believes it's crucial to ensure customers' infrastructure can support real-time voice and video and to make sure applications are running smoothly through call monitoring and quality of service benchmarks. The company's SBC offer those crucial monitoring tools and Martin believes they are one of the only companies out there to address the four crucial network elements: connect, protect, optimize and monitor. This ultimately reduces the OPEX (News - Alert) of the application.

Edgewater recently launched the EdgeMarc 250 SBC, designed specifically for small to medium sized businesses while delivery enterprise-class functionality. It is part of the EdgeMarc suite of enterprise SBCs, offering reduced operational and capital expenses of up to 90 percent while also improving call quality, security and simplifying the user experience. The products are plug and dial ready and offer an integrated VoIP Test Agent to enable service providers and enterprises to install hosted VoIP service within minutes.

Martin says the company plans to take things to the next level of service in the future by providing more advanced troubleshooting. The company sees a trend toward integration of components, which is especially useful for smaller businesses. Integrating IADs and gateways with SBCs makes sense as companies move toward consolidation and elimination of multiple, bulky boxes.