June 05, 2012

Ingate Makes Available Family of Software-only E-SBCs

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Today, Ingate Systems (News - Alert) came out with a full line of software-only enterprise session border controllers.

These E-SBCs – called the Ingate Software SIParator and Ingate Software Firewall – were design to enable SIP communications such as SIP trunking and unified communications beyond the protected enterprise network.

As noted by TMC in April, Steven Johnson (News - Alert), Ingate president, says his company has seen a great demand for a software version of its enterprise session border controller solution. Those asking for this included companies that build other equipment, such as PBXs, that want to run both PBX (News - Alert) and SBC functionality on virtual machines so end customers can manage all of the above through a single user interface. Johnson adds that some companies that wanted to run the Ingate E-SBC on different hardware, or require a server with greater capacity than that offered by the company’s turnkey solution, were also asking for a software-only solution.

“The industry is moving toward software-based offerings as a means of consolidating existing hardware or maintaining a single hardware platform,” Johnson told TMC (News - Alert) in an interview earlier this year. “The trend will continue given the growing adoption of unified communication.”

Ingate’s E-SBC software – which can handle from as few as five simultaneous calls to as many as 10,000, depending on the hardware used – can be installed on customers’ own servers (or integrated with IP PBXs or media gateways) or used as a virtualized application.   

Beyond its current uses, the E-SBC  is also part of a larger vision called Internet+ being forwarded by Karl Stahl (News - Alert), who is the chairman of Intertex Data AB and CEO of Ingate. Internet+ will allow end users to realize natural and universal communications, and enable facilities-based service providers to benefit in the process, says Stahl.

As discussed in the cover story of June’s INTERNET TELEPHONY issue (which will post to TMCnet in early July), Internet+ extends the Internet a bit, applies Internet thinking, and provides a standard real-time interface for users and servers. And, says Stahl, the infrastructure needed to get to Internet+ costs just a fraction of what is spent on POTS replication over IP today.

Edited by Brooke Neuman