When you’re ready, Enghouse will be there to help you scale your new SBC-based services to global Web delivery levels
Before the cloud, you probably used Session Border Controllers as a bit of useful, but non-mission-critical bit of on-prem network equipment. After all, it was (and is) designed to secure Voice over IP infrastructure and interworking between incompatible signaling messages and sessions from end devices or application servers.
You may well still be using the SBC like that—which is fine. But you may also be starting to see how it can lend itself to a lot of other services… services that also, of course, represent extra (or extended) potential revenue streams.
Enghouse has been tracking the development of the SBC as a core building block of telco services. We’ve seen, for example, its value in helping MVNOs easily scale up from light to full – put simply, you can’t really take any control over services unless you build the foundations with a suitable SBC solution.
Another area of growing interest is its use in helping get you set for IMS and Voice over LTE, where it can both act as SIP proxy and also guarantee peer network connection, among other benefits.
SBCs are also being tapped for their aid in helping the market move beyond base data connectivity to more complete service portfolios, like offering your customers voice over emerging private infrastructures.
Enabling MVNO differentiation
For example, we’ve helped many MVNOs to extend their service offer and to reach niche segments. One example: A Norwegian MVNO that has leveraged our SBC to support an innovative, award-winning suite of B2B services – tackling a challenging niche head on and carving out market share against more established service providers – with a digital-first offer the delights even the smallest organisations. What niche would you like to target?
Use cloud as a seamless SBC enabler with Enghouse
But: we did say pre-cloud. SBCs are network devices, and so have only so much built-in capacity. That can be a problem when you want to work at Internet scale and today’s level of digital business agility. The good news is that Enghouse is already helping operators seamlessly embed their SBC functionality into their cloud service.
In the most recent case, our team’s helped a Tier-1 European operator automate provision, so that when available capacity reaches a threshold, additional SBC instances are spun-up on Amazon AWS to immediately meet demand.
It turns out that this is just one of the many value-add products that Enghouse is delivering to clients interested in exploring the potential of the SBC for their future. (Another is our native support for Diameter, giving you management of both sessions and online charging system platform direct communication.)
You can find out more about both these Enghouse services and the story of the new-look SBC in our new downloadable paper, The Session Border Controller: indispensable for service evolution 1 and The Session Border Controller: indispensable for service evolution 2.
