Number 1 in session control, Netrake signs SunRocket

Netrake earned the top spot in a recent market share report from Frost & Sullivan, which ranked suppliers of session border control equipment. Also this week, Netrake announced the sale of a number of nCite session controllers to emerging residential VoIP provider SunRocket.

Based on the number of sessions shipped, Netrake captured 29% of the border controller market worldwide as of the second quarter of 2004. Acme Packet was second with 23% of the market and Kagoor came in third with 16%.

Also making the list were Jasomi at 13% and NexTone at 5% with the remaining 14% divided among other vendors, including Mera, Versatel, Mediaring, Ingate, VocalTec, Quintum and Edgewater, according to the report.

Netrake customers include Level 3 Communications, Volo Communications, Trinsic and as of this week (publicly) SunRocket. Netrake accounts for many of the sessions that put Netrake at number one.

"There is no doubt that Level 3 is a huge player in the VoIP space. We have been in live deployment there for over two years," said Micaela Giuhat, assistant vice president of product management at Netrake. "But we also won a lot of new tier 2 customers."

Netrake's nCite session controller provides secure traversal of firewall and network address translation (FW/NAT) systems, as well as denial of service attack prevention through deep packet inspection at both the SIP signaling and VoIP media layers. Netrake serves residential, enterprise and wholesale VoIP service providers.

Netrake will provide these services to SunRocket, which is currently rolling out its residential, flat rate service to 30 or more markets. SunRocket announced this week the appointment of Kevin Bennis, former president and CEO of Sprint Canada, as its new CEO. Founder and current CEO, Paul Erickson, will assume chairmanship.

Netrake sells two sizes of session border controller. The nCite SE is a three-unit high gigabit Ethernet session controller capable of handling up to 21,000 concurrent VoIP calls. The flagship nCite handles up to 42,000 concurrent sessions. A single session controller chassis supports 150,000 VoIP end-points with up to a 10:1 over-subscription ratio.

"They made their decision really fast in who they wanted to partner with," said Capriccio Martin, director of corporate communications at Netrake. "Their criteria was: 'Can you scale?' because they have a big growth plan and the over subscription [capability] was a mandatory requirement for their residential business plan."