Posts Tagged ‘acme packet’

Dialogic wants one gateway to rule them all

Who doesn’t love SIP these days? Companies big and small these days are high on sipping. With that came a market for SIP trunking for wider adoption and cost savings, and border demarcation (i.e. Session Border Control) for security and conversion.

SIP trunking services are offered by the ISPs and IP carriers. Forget about the PSTN to merge your corporate telephony network — go with SIP trunks and all of your enterprise phones could talk to each other in a short time. Of course, that’s assuming you’ve deployed a trusty VoIP solution.

But when the VoIP call has to go outside of the corporation, what happens? That’s when media gateways and session border controllers (SBCs) come to play. Media gateways are normally sold by the telephony vendors as well, especially the traditional TDM PBX vendors because of their migration path to VoIP. The new market where money is made is in VoIP border control and security. Right now Acme Packet leads the pack in that area, but others like Dialogic are starting to salivate over that piece of pie…

It appears that Dialogic is planning to stuff every feature possible into a new gateway product — in essence, “Lord of the Gateways”:

We are in the process of developing a new product which we are currently calling the Dialogic Border Gateway. The Dialogic Border Gateway will enable the connection of virtually any type of network trunk, either a PSTN Trunk or a SIP Trunk, with virtually any premise based PBX, legacy TDM PBX, hybrid PBX, or IP-PBX. The Border Gateway will also provide the required security functions to establish a demarcation point between the enterprise network edge and the service provider network. In future posts I will provide more detail on the Border Gateway product as well as some addition insight into the SIP Trunking market. I welcome others to share their insights in these areas as well.

Wow, can it also vacuum my house?! This will be a gateway to end all gateways. Details are still vague, but definitely keep an eye on this one.

Skype makes another enterprise move with SIP trunks offering

Not satisfied with just capturing the hearts of everyday consumers, Skype will offer SIP trunks to attract more enterprise users. In a partnership with SBC and Acme Packet, Skype opens this beta program to enterprises that wish to save money and provide employees with a familiar VoIP client to communicate at work. The offering won’t support video yet, but we all know Skype excels in its wideband audio codec. Eventually video will be supported for sure.

Sorell Slaymaker writes about the immediate values with SIP trunks:

1. International Customer Calls–Supporting toll free internationally is expensive and difficult, especially for customers who call a lot. Skype offers a simple click to call application that any company can add to its web site. When a customer wants to talk with the company, they hit the click to call app, enter some information, then wait for a call. This gives the enterprise the ability to find the right resource and the right network to most efficiently and effectively interact with the customer.

2. Interaction with Colleagues–For conference calls of just a few people, where some of the people are offsite, Skype works well. If connectivity is not robust, colleagues understand. Most users with decent Internet access find Skype “good enough”.

3. Airplanes–As WiFi becomes available on more airplanes, users will demand voice communication, even if the quality is poor.

But for a good and updated read about this offering, check out Dan York’s post about this.