Can Metaswitch make a dent in crowded SBC market?

When it comes to session border controllers, there’s Acme Packet – and everyone else. Metaswitch, best known for its VoIP and application server platforms, nonetheless has a deep history in SBCs, supplying an SBC software stack to large NEMs and reselling the crucial network element from a variety of partners as part of IP deployments.

Now it wants a piece of this growing market itself – today unveiling a new session border controller, dubbed Perimeta, that is says more clearly separates signaling and media function to better scale inside of today’s session-heavy mobile networks, said Patrick Fitzgerald, Metaswitch's vice president of SIP Infrastructure, in an interview.

Today, says Fitzgerald, the market is dominated by “pizza boxes,” or smaller SBC appliances that service providers (and enterprises) strategically place in the network to handle IP signaling, security and transcoding requirements. In addition, those boxes typically have “capacity modeled after voice calls,” supporting VoIP network deployments, he said.

More recently, however, SBCs are playing a much more important role in handling more dynamic IP session management for data applications, especially in emerging 4G (especially LTE) wireless networks where smartphones spawn countless IP sessions. New IP applications, like presence and messaging, are also very session and signaling heavy. In those cases, while media demands are fairly consistent with past use cases, signaling requirements are booming. “The market is demanding the scaling of signaling independent of media, and they want it on industry standard hardware,” Fitzgerald said.

Carriers want to be able to pick and choose how much signaling they put in a network versus media” – in either a centralized or more network-decomposed approach.
Metaswitch enters, essentially from scratch, an SBC market dominated by Acme Packet but with an array of competitors – including Genband, Sonus Networks, Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks – offering SBCs of various sorts and sizes. Metaswitch is aiming to compete across the board in SBCs, with solutions suited for small to large deployments, Fitzgerald said.

Perimeta features discrete software modules for signaling and media functions that can be installed on separate hardware elements to provide a distributed solution to session border control, or combined together as an integrated appliance. The ACTA-based Perimeta comes in 2-slot and 4-slote hardware variations supporting either single 6-core Xeon (the GX 6320) or dual 6-core Xeon (the GX 6340) flavors, with individual integrated, signaling and media session controllers.

The hardware is fully-integrated with Metaswitch’s MetaView Service Assurance Server, to help manage SBC performance within the network, important as the platform plays an increasingly diverse role – including signaling and media management, security and SIP transcoding and interop – in carrier networks.