Siemens Announces SBCSiemens Announces SBC

A new session border controller gives Siemens customers an option.

As Zeus recently wrote, session border controllers are becoming an ever-more important product category, and it's one where there are few challengers to the dominant player, Acme Packet. Now Siemens Enterprise has announced an SBC offering, and while SEN built the SBC itself, rather than OEMing its offering, as Avaya is doing with Acme Packet, SEN is also not aiming to challenge Acme Packet for overall SBC dominance.

The new OpenScape Session Border Controller is software that's scaled up from embedded capabilities that already exist in Siemens OpenScape Branch solution, according to Michael Leo of SEN. Upgrading the software allowed Siemens to bring its own SBC to market without OEMing, he said; the OpenScape SBC runs on industry-standard Linux servers from IBM or Fujitsu, in contrast to Acme Packet's proprietary hardware.

However, Siemens is only aiming the OpenScape SBC at its own customers; "We're not going to try and sell this on Cisco or ShoreTel systems," for example, Leo said. As a result, Siemens will also continue its existing partnership with Acme Packet and will resell Acme Packet SBCs to customers who, for example, may have multi-vendor networks that require an SBC that can work with multiple vendors' platforms--which Acme Packet can do and the new SEN SBC won't.

Another difference between the SEN and Acme Packet SBCs is that SEN uses a GUI interface instead of the command line used by Acme Packet. Siemens wanted to offer a single point of administration for both its OpenScape Voice call control platform and the new SBC, Mike Leo said.

The new OpenScape SBC scales from 1 to 4,000 concurrent sessions, which supports up to 15,000 users. Siemens will sell licenses in any increment the user wants, as opposed to bundling in multiples of 10 or other such blocks of session capacity.

The OpenScape SBC is GA now, Mike said.