Covergence, Interoute - Making Noise about Business VoIP

At the recent VON show, Covergence were making some announcements about new service provider partners, but also more importantly as they see it, a shift towards more acceptance of SBC products in the enterprise. Covergence are a manufacturer of Session Border Controller products, or in other words a kind of firewall for SIP. Rod Hodgman, VP of Marketing for Covergence prefers to use the term "Session Manager" for their type of products, protecting the accesss edge of the network from call manner of nasty behaviour. In addition, they enable some interesting IM functionality (of which more in a moment) that starts to become important in the world of Microsoft Office Communications Server. Hodgman announced that their partner Nuvio use the Covergence software on the IBM Blade Center, definitely an enterprise product, albeit for the large enterprise. He says that there is a detectable increase in enterprise interest in session manager products. Is it inconcievable that SBCs will one day be as common in enterprises as firewalls? The understanding of VoIP and penetration of IP telephony in businesses are not at a high enough level today, but this will change in the future.

Covergence were also running a seminar with their customer and partner Interoute, focused around the recently launched InterouteOne service, which we reported here before. Interoute is a telco, and large SIP services operator in Europe. Customers that have already installed Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Live Communications Server (LCS) can connect to InterouteOne, and use it as a managed service to connect offices together for phone and IM services. Even better, companies can federate with anyone that uses InterouteOne, allowing IM and presence information across company boundaries, and even free phone calls within the InterouteOne network. Covergence provide the technology not only protecting the border for Interoute, but also some special magic like allowing OCS clients to communicate with IBM Sametime clients, and even standalone softphones for remote workers.

Mark Lewis, Director Voice&Media for Interoute, described how OCS and LCS customers could sign-up online in about 5 minutes to enjoy these federation services. There is also the tantalizing possibility of connecting sites without using gateways or PBXes. I followed this up with Lewis, but he was keen to say that Interoute do not advocate PBX-less operation, since they can also provide services that integrate legacy PBXes into InterouteOne such as managed E1 connections. This is very much in tune with the current positioning of OCS from Microsoft themselves, who are keen to be partners of PBX companies like Nortel, Mitel, Siemens and NEC Philips, who use OCS as part of a Unified Communications offering. Experts that I have spoken to believe that in any case OCS is not functional enough to be a full-fledged PBX replacement product, and so partnership for Microsoft is a practical route.

InterouteOne looks like an interesting new way to provide federated IM services, but altogether OCS/LCS is still a complex puzzle for IT and telephony managers to figure out.