As SIP trunking continues to expand and adoption accelerates, many customers are now starting to examine capabilities of SBCs that go beyond border security functions.  When examining the functions of an SBC, it often opens up overall IT voice, video and data architecture discussions concerning how today's VoIP based PBX networks are designed and how to simplify these networks.

Typically, customer VoIP networks have evolved over many years via IP-PBX upgrades to support SIP and H.323, and many times there are more than one vendor's solutions installed.  Also, with the ever present merger and acquisition activities, IT departments often spend numerous cycles working through pair-wise interoperability between different vendors.  With the SIP standard having many optional methods for implementation, the complexity of interoperability between PBX's directly within an enterprise has grown to being nearly unmanageable.  

Enter SIP trunking and SBC's.  Because of the variations within the SIP standards, and the different functionality enabled across SIP trunk Service Providers, Sonus SBC's have had to be able to adapt to each Service Provider's requirements without having to develop new functionality within the code base for each new Service Provider we sell into.  Therefore, when Sonus architected our next generation SBC's, we took this SIP adaptability into consideration, along with our understanding of current status of enterprise PBX deployments, and designed a very simple method for being able to build SIP Message Manipulation adapters for both the ingress and egress side of calls flowing through our platform. These adapters can be applied and activated without having to change the code or even reboot the system for that matter.  This enables us to have flexibility to work within any service provider environment to easily meet their evolving functionality requirements within their timeframes, as well as to provide added value within enterprise environments.

As the Enterprise environments introduce SBCs on their side of the Service Provider SIP trunks, this naturally leads customers to the next step which is preferring the SBC to become the centralized hub between their PBX infrastructure, essentially normalizing all of the different vendor's SIP implementations amongPBXs as well as providing a secure connection out to the SIP Service Provider for PSTN access.  The normalization may range from simple SIP diversion header manipulation to transcoding between various codecs to interworking H.323 based PBX systems to SIP based systems.  And all of this is centrally managed and maintained in a carrier class high availability product, ensuring reliability and scalability as needed.

Once the SBC begins to provide the core interworking function along with the SIP trunking capability, this opens up the IT organization to exploring options for deploying next generation UC solutions within the customer premise or bringing in cloud based SIP services.  It also opens up the capability for creating a centralized dialplan capability which reduces operational costs and allows customers to introduce advanced routing concepts to integrate video and route based upon session type etc........But that's a story for another post.