The Winning SBC Formula: Delivering Innovation, Security and Value to Leading Contact Center as a Service Providers

In their October 2018 report, “Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, North America,” Gartner states “the evolution of the contact center to form the basis of “the customer experience center’” has changed the dynamics of the CCaaS market.” In this report they identified three vendors: Nice inContact, Five9, and Genesys as the only CCaaS providers in the “Leading” quadrant.  All three excel on their ability to execute and the completeness of their vision. All three are also Ribbon Session Border Controller (SBC) customers.

Coincidence? I think not.

At Ribbon, we have been delivering best-in-class technology solutions and service to our customers for decades. We continue to invest and innovate to ensure our customers can take advantage of our deep knowledge of VoIP and our implementation expertise in both public and private cloud environments. As a proof point, all three leading CCaaS providers have already deployed Ribbon SBCs as appliances and decided to continue with Ribbon as they migrate their services onto public clouds.

In the Gartner report, one of their evaluation criteria with a “high” weighting, is Product or Service, which represents the aggregate functionality provided in the CCaaS offer. An SBC is the enabler for secure call routing and call handling, making it is a key component of contact center services. Three examples of why our SBCs excel in Contact Center deployments are:

• Security. Full suite of “session aware” security with: topology hiding; line-rate DoS/DDoS protection; line-rate malformed or rogue RTP protection, TLS and IPSec for signaling encryption; and Secure RTP/RTCP for media encryption.
• Call transfer options. High degree of flexibility for call routing and handling with a complete set of call transfer options using SIP REFER, SIP REFER with Replaces, REFER relay, and INVITE with Replaces.
• SIP Recording (SIPRec). Feature-rich, secure, and reliable SIP recording, with extensive SIP message manipulation to ensure interoperability with recorders; the ability to send rich metadata to recorders for downstream analytics; optional encryption of signaling and media packets sent towards the recorder; and the forking for up to (4) recorders simultaneously.

Now deploy the same Contact Center solution on a public cloud and include Ribbon’s cloud-native Session Border Controller Software Edition (SBC SWe).  What additional values are these leading CCaaS providers taking advantage of?

Four examples come to mind:

• Scale. With innovative application design and the ability to leverage complementary innovation from cloud infrastructure suppliers, such as Intel, VMware, and Nvidia, Ribbon delivers concurrent session scalability that is equivalent to appliance-based solutions. In addition, on the public cloud they gain the advantage that scalability can be done more dynamically with a much lower investment profile.
• High Availability. Traditionally, high availability mechanisms on a public cloud were designed based upon the requirements of web-based applications, but unfortunately, these fail to meet the rapid failover times required for real-time communications (RTC) on the public cloud. Ribbon inherently understands RTC availability requirements and delivers a cloud-based solution for high availability and rapid failover to ensure call continuity.
• Monitoring. Ability to integrate with Ribbon Analytics providing actionable insights to understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
• Open source integration. Ribbon is committed to supporting integration with open source software toolkits from industry leaders such as Red Hat and Terraform to optimize and automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment.

These are just a few of the many examples of how Ribbon continues to innovate and invest in our cloud-native SBCs to ensure our CCaaS customers will remain leaders in their market. We understand that our customers look to us for best-in-class technical solutions that not only secure their contact center services in the cloud, but also ensure they can deliver high-quality, high-value services to successfully maintain and grow their customer base in an increasingly competitive marketplace.