SBC vendors take exception to talk of demise

Leaders in the session border control market this week challenged published reports and speculation that question the long-term viability of the SBC market, given a recent spate of acquisitions.

The roll-ups of Jasomi, Kagoor, Netrake and Nuera does not signal anything more than the natural weeding out of weak competitors, said Kevin Mitchell, director of solutions marketing for Acme Packet.

“Consolidation has to do with competitive forces and natural thinning of the players in the market,” said Mitchell. “This is a market segment that saw a flurry of start-ups enter, and the consolidation and establishment of winners and losers is natural as the SBC segment moved from evangelization to product development to commercial deployment.”

Mitchell was reacting to speculation that entire SBC companies or product lines will be subsumed into router or switching products. Some of that is based on reports, such as a recent Infonetics Research report, in which principal analyst Stephane Teral said that, “SBCs have become a strategic component in next-generation networks and that many vendors will likely shift from a stand-alone to an integrated SBC architecture, including Cisco, Juniper and AudioCodes.”

“The problem is, people use different terms to describe very different concepts,” said Seamus Hourihan, Acme Packet's vice president of marketing and product management. “We use integrated to define the integration of signaling and media in one element. We use decompose to define the separation of those functions into different physical platforms. And when Stephane [Teral] talked about going from stand-alone to integrated, he meant some stand-alone products, not stand-alone companies.”

And not everyone means the same thing when they talk about SBCs themselves, according to Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing for NexTone. He said people lump interconnect vendors in with SBC vendors, but he sees the applications within the perceived SBC market to be very different. Companies commonly referred to as SBC vendors control two types of connectivity to a service provider network: end-user connectivity and network-to-network interconnections. The former, he admits, is a function that likely could be subsumed into other products such as switches or routers.

“But the network-to-network interconnection is much more complex, and that complexity is unlikely to be subsumed by a router because it is very computer-intensive, and a lot more brainpower is required. A router is just not equipped to do that,” Dearing said.

He said that for reasons of scale, large service providers are looking for disaggregated solutions. “They want something that will scale easily from the lab to field trials to full-scale deployment and that will give them the flexibility to address new applications.”

What they don't want, Mitchell said, is for those solutions to become part of another network element. In fact, according to at least one analyst, he said, only 15% of service providers said SBCs would be ideally integrated in another network element.

There is not universal agreement, however. Nathan Franzmeier, CEO of Emergent Network Solutions, sees the matter differently. Emergent provides what Franzmeier calls network-wide session control. That includes SBC and the IP multimedia subsystem-compliant call session control function to Tier 2 and smaller companies. Emergent, which also has a softswitch platform and other products, was acquired this week by Stratus Computer (see story on page 16), and here's what Franzmeier had to say about SBC technology:

“Session border control is a technology for a solution, rather than a reason for a stand-alone company. I think most SBC companies will need to be absorbed.”