Sonus Networks is targeting both service providers and enterprises with two new session border controllers that are designed to simplify network design and add advanced communications features in unified communications environments.
In March, the company was noted in an Infonetics Research report as the vendor with the fastest-growing SBC portfolio, gaining an additional 7.3% of the market year-over-year and seeing SBC revenues grow 67% over the previous year.
The new Sonus SBC 5110 and 5210 session border controllers have a modular design to allow customers to install up to four digital signal processors, and Sonus also introduced new DSP cards with greater system capacity for border-based media control and services.
The SBC announcement comes in conjunction with a major new software release for its SBC 5100 series, extending multimedia features for unified communications, along with security and management features with about 100 new enhancements, including call recording for contact centers and bandwidth-based call admission control.
David Tipping, VP and general manager of SBC business for Sonus, called the announcement “a new commitment to both the enterprise and service provider markets with new hardware and software features to enable both in moving forward.”
The company also has a line of SBCs designed specifically for Microsoft Lync deployments, and its SBC 1000 and 2000 series now have Survivable Branch Appliance functionality, which allows 3G/4G mobile broadband failover in the event of a wide area network outage. Tipping said that enterprises want to still have some unified communications operations that are protected regardless of whether the business can fully operate, and the wireless failover provides that.
Sonus also announced yesterday that  Smarttel Technologies Limited, which is an international carrier wholesale operator based in Bangladesh, is deploying its SBC 5100 as the session initiation protocol (SIP) interconnect platform for its network. The SBCs are being deployed at the points where Smarttel’s network meets others to provide network security and monitor and enforce service levels.
