Siemens Develops Its Own SBC Technology for OpenScape Voice

Siemens Enterprise Communications is breaking the tradition of selling third-party session border controller technology for its OpenScape Voice offering by developing its own SBC technology.

Aptly named OpenScape Session Border Controller, the technology aims to secure VoIP sessions and provide a lower total cost of ownership for OpenScape Voice users, said Michael Leo, senior marketing manager at Siemens Enterprise Communications.

“There has been a proliferation of service providers deploying SIP trunking and an increasing number of companies deploying remote worker and contact center environments, not to mention the explosion of cloud services. And in almost all of these scenarios there was a session border controller defending the edge,” he said. “Now those SBCs are moving downstream to the enterprise edge.”

And with the increasing number of enterprises deploying SIP trunking as a way to save money, SBC at the enterprise edge is becoming more common in environments, especially those that use VoIP.

“With SIP technology there is always a question of how secure the VoIP traffic is,” Leo noted.

OpenScape SBC is a Linux-based, open software app designed specifically for OpenScape Voice customers. “We’re not out to sell it on other systems,” he said. “Users of OpenScape Voice will find it easy to manage because it’s the same look and feel and capability as OpenScape Voice, which offers a greater ROI because you already know it.”

OpenScape SBC is built to handle SIP trunking termination from as many as 10 service providers. It ensures security by terminating a SIP session outside of the enterprise voice network and makes sure the traffic is originating from an authorized source and has no irregularities. Once it passes muster, the voice traffic then can pass to the enterprise voice LAN.

The technology is the same SBC functionality baked into Siemens’ OpenScape Branch solution, which only scales to 400 users. “We took it out and put in on its own separate server, which gives us more scalability,” Leo said. The result: OpenScape SBC supports up to 4,000 simultaneous sessions on a single server, up to 15,000 sessions. Users beyond that number can purchase additional sessions on a per-session basis rather than buying blocks of sessions – the pricing model of a number of other vendors’ SBC offerings, Leo said.

“Our pricing structure is a real value-add and something our channel partners can really use to their advantage,” Leo said. “If our channel partners are selling OpenScape Voice then hopefully they see OpenScape SBC is a complementary technology with a lower TCO because it uses off-the-shelf servers and features per-session pricing, plus the same management interface as OpenScape Voice.”

OpenScape SBC is available now for OpenScape Voice, and Siemens Enterprise Communications plans to make the technology available to its HiPath 4000 install base by the end of the year.

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