Spotlight on SBCs with Ingate - my Latest on BCStrategies

Every so often I’ll do a spotlight piece on a trend or technology, especially ones that are not well-understood. I’ve been following the session border controller space since inception - 2004 - and it falls squarely into that bucket. Ingate Systems is one of the early players, and they’re still going strong, so that makes them a good partner for this exercise, and recently I’ve been working on this with their President, Steve Johnson.

The output is a fairly long Q&A, where we discuss the evolution of SBCs, why they’re important and what to look ahead for in 2021. Our discussion has been posted now to the BCStrategies portal, where I’ve been a contributing BC Expert for ages. I hope you give it a read, and would love to hear your thoughts.

Book Review - Hacking Exposed for UC and VoIP

I don't usually write book reviews, and I've never written a business book. Definitely looked into the latter, and I'm sure I could it, but it just hasn't grabbed me enough to do one. I'll bet I could ghost-write a good book for someone else, though, so if that grabs you, I'm not hard to find. :-)

Back to business. Mark Collier is the CTO with SecureLogix - both he and the company know the nuts of bolts of IT security really well. I've known Mark for some time, and when the 2nd edition of this book came out, he sent me a copy and asked if I'd be kind enough to review it. Our paths crossed recently once he saw the white paper I authored on VoIP security for VoIPshield. Since we're on the same wavelength about these issues, I was more than happy to do it.

The book at hand focuses specifically on IT threats related to VoIP and UC, and is part of an ongoing series of books under the Hacking Exposed theme. Mark co-authors these books with David Endler, another major thought leader and practitioner in ths space.

I decided to post my book review on Amazon.com instead of here since it will get broader exposure there. I'm not a big online shopper, but have recently discovered the joys of hunting down hard-to-find CDs and books there, and have since added a couple of short review of CDs. If you've never posted a review on Amazon, it's easy to do, and I figured why not post my Hacking Exposed review there too.

Without further ado, then, you can read my Customer Review here, and I hope you find it helpful - maybe even helpful enough to add their book to your shopping cart! There are a few other reviews about the book as well (much shorter than mine!), so you can see that I'm not alone in giving it two thumbs up.

Acme Packet Acquires Covergence - Surprised?

I didn't know this was coming, but am not really surprised. This morning Acme Packet announced they were acquiring Covergence for a little under $23 million. In this economy, it's hard to say if that's a lot of money or a little money, but Acme is pretty shrewd and their management team is very seasoned, so my guess is that it's probably about right.

The basic details are in the press release, which adds that there will be a concall later today to share a bit more with those who wish to learn more.

I'm not surprised by the news in that it's very much in line with how the network infrastructure space has been consolidating over the past 2 years. It's part of the evolution process as leaders emerge across the various segments, and the followers have to make decisions about their future.

Acme and Covergence are really the last ones standing among pureplays in the session border controller space, and this move is no different than what has been happening in the other segments, especially media gateways and application servers. For gateways, look no further than GenBand and the moves they've been making; and for AS, it's basically BroadSoft's world now.

I've followed the SBC space since inception, and the much-anticipated consolidation process is now complete. What was once a face-off between Acme and Netrake (remember them?) for the Tier 1 carriers has now become another BroadSoft-like scenario. Early players like Kagoor and NexTone are gone, and while smaller players like Mera and Sansay are still out there, Acme pretty much has won the game.

For those who always felt SBCs could not survive as a standalone category, you can feel vindicated today - more or less. However, as was shown with Juniper and Kagoor, the Tier 1 equipment vendors have not succeeded in taking this market and simply adding SBCs to routers or gateways. To some extent this is being done by the likes of AudioCodes and MetaSwitch, but with Covergence being acquired, Acme can lay claim as proof that standalone SBCs have a future.

They may not capture all demand for SBC solutions, but there is definitely a value proposition there. Now that they don't have to deal with any head-on competitors, Acme can concentrate on keeping that value prop strong. Will they eventually be acquired by a Tier 1? Probably - but that's down the road.

Before that can happen, they must tie up their served market first, and that's what we're seeing today. With both companies being Massachusetts-based, the integration process should be pretty expedient. In terms of staying competitive - and alive - it's a good move for both companies, and hats off to Acme for living up to their name and finally getting to the top of the mountain.