I got some news yesterday from my friends at Covergence that slipped through the cracks in my mailbox. hen I found it there today I wanted to point it out for a very specific reason I'll touch on at the end of the post.

The CVA-50 is the industry’s first Session Border Controller delivered as a virtual appliance. The CVA-50 enables enterprises and service providers to deploy Covergence session management software as a pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run application, packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. By doing so, Covergence customers can now run its session management software on any x86-hardware, making it easier to deploy at multiple branch offices or SMBs.

This product was developed in response to our growing Fortune 500 customer base that is using our product to integrate the “islands of VoIP communications” so that they can finally capture the promised cost savings of VoIP and transition to unified communications.

For those of you I have spoken to recently, you know that we have had a significant increase in our large enterprise business over the last six months (five of the Fortune 25 have adopted Covergence Session Manager to integrate VoIP traffic onto their WAN). The CVA-50 makes it possible for them to easily and cost-effectively integrate the VoIP traffic from their thousands of branch offices into their exiting WAN.

Features include:

• Near-end and far-end NAT traversal
• Network topology hiding
• Cryptographic authentication
• TLS/SRTP and IPsec encryption
• Signaling and media validation
• Intrusion and DOS attack prevention
• Session admission control
• Session detail recording
• Call recording
• QOS monitoring
• Deep SIP message inspection and protocol repair
• Feature server and IP PBX interoperability
• Dynamic routing based on cost, congestion, other criteria
• Support for audio, video, IM, and presence, not just VoIP
• A single point of policy enforcement for all sessions
• Total visibility and control over real-time applications

Related links:
CVA download request page - http://www.covergence.com/contact/trial_request.php

CVA external FAQ - http://www.covergence.com/content897.html

Why did this announcement jump out at me? It's simple really. When you work in the world of large enterprise telecommunications, words like appliance are huge motivators. Huge. The idea of getting away from general purpose computers with operating systems that might be at risk for any number of reasons to an appliance-based infrastructure is a huge driver for many technology managers. Add to that the idea of virtual systems, another attention getter, and you've got a really hot product. 

Virtual Appliances
Virtual appliances are pre-built, ready-to-run applications packaged
along with an operating system inside a virtual machine. Virtual
appliances are a new approach to software distribution that can lead to
lower support costs, better quality software, improved scalability and
quicker deployments.

I see this as a hot one coming from Covergence.


Technorati Tags: Covergence, Session Border Controller, SBC, CVA, virtual appliance, unified communications, VoIP