VON: Kagoor announces Swisscomm contract and adds data NAT functionality

SAN JOSE--Kagoor Networks will be showing off new data network address translation capabilities for its session border controller product at this week's Voice on the Net conference in San Jose. The company also announced Swisscom as its latest publicly announced Tier 1 customer.

Kagoor's VoiceFlow product now can be deployed in both an "On the Path" or "Off the Path" configuration, which allows network operators of fully converged networks or networks designed to segregate voice and data traffic to use the product as a one-stop security solution.

Operators can now deploy Kagoor's session border controller without having to create what is known as a DMZ, or demilitarized zone, which separates the border controller from the network, said Jim Greenway, vice president of marketing at Kagoor.

The On the Path configuration now supports Data NAT functionality, including header NAT, source NAT, HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP and FTP. The Off the Path configuration allows operators to add border control and security non-intrusively into their segregated voice networks.

"We developed a Data NAT capability that takes some of the data firewall functionality and incorporates it into the border [controller]" Greenway said.

Supporting both configurations allows the VoiceFlow solution to accommodate all security paradigms by replacing or adding to a legacy firewall with or without a DMZ for converged or segregated VoIP and data traffic.

"Every Tier 1 carrier we are looking at is interested in using both configurations. Doing VPN/VLAN technology on-path, for example, is in demand because integrated voice and data traffic is traveling down those VPNs," Greenway said.

Greenway also said the new functionality was developed with the cooperation of several Tier 1 customers. While not officially announced as one of its co-development partners, Swisscom will use Kagoor's VoiceFlow 3000 session border controllers to enable its new Bluewin Phone consumer broadband offering for DSL-based VoIP, and video services. The service will use the product to provide network protection and hosted NAT solutions.

The move to incorporate firewall functionality into its border controller is contrary to some industry speculation that firewalls would begin to subsume the SBC. "If the firewall is going to subsume the SBC, we wouldn't be hearing otherwise from customers and wouldn't have over 100 of them and a lot more on the table, Greenway said.

He said there would be "a little functionality leakage into other devices, but people are figuring out that the SBCs have to be purpose built, deep packet inspection devices. "Voice is a different animal than IP data and data firewalls were meant to deal with data IP traffic. Clearly, voice is a new frontier and we are doing things that data firewalls were not designed to do," Greenway said. The Swisscom solution also utilizes Siemens SURPASS hiE 9200 softswitch and the SURPASS hiG 1200 VoIP media gateway, and Sylantro applications feature server.