It is no secret that voice-over-IP (VoIP) and unified communication is the direction of business communication. While in many cases consumers are still playing with VoIP as they gradually move away from landlines and embrace VoIP technologies such as Skype (News - Alert) and Google Voice, many businesses are already realizing the advantages of VoIP and making the technology a core part of their voice communications infrastructure.

One challenge for businesses looking to use VoIP is the firewall.

Commonly VoIP service providers connect with a business’s session initiation protocol-based private branch exchange (IP-PBX (News - Alert)) via SIP trunking. But traditional firewalls block or hinder SIP traffic, effectively limiting the use of VoIP.

That’s where InGate comes in, a Stockholm-based company that designs and develops solutions for unified communications and VoIP.

InGate offers a line of session border controllers that perform the role of a traditional firewall, but also allow SIP traffic, including its InGate Firewalls and InGate SIParators.

While the InGate Firewall line of appliances are state of the art firewalls designed to work with SIP, its SIParators line are devices that connect to an existing firewall to enable SIP.

InGate developed the world’s first SIP-capable firewall, according to the company, and recently it has continued to advance session border control technology by offering a software-based version of its SIP-enabled products.

“It definitely is a very useful way for people to deploy our product on their hardware,” noted Steven Johnson (News - Alert) in an interview with TMC at ITEXPO Miami in January, president of InGate.

“Deploying it on their hardware, they can either do it on a server they like--so they can have all the same servers in their data center if they want to--or they can integrate it with some other products in a virtual machine environment,” he said.

The Software Firewall/SIParator from InGate is the software version of enterprise session border controllers. Like its hardware-based controllers, the Software Firewall/SIParator help make SIP-based communications possible. But being software-based, businesses have more flexibility.

Being able to leverage virtual machine technology is a particular advantage of the new software-based session border controllers. Johnson said that using the software on a virtual machine can help make configuration easier.

“[Virtual machines] will make it easier for people to configure, putting it on a single server instead of multiple servers, and take advantage of the benefits that virtual machine technology permits in today’s environment,” he said.

The InGate Software Firewall/SIParator comes in several versions that allow from 25 to 10,000 concurrent sessions.

You can watch our full interview with Steven Johnson during ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami above.