I recently had a briefing with this new kid on the SBC block, Covergence. That is ‘Convergence’ minus the letter ‘n’ (that confusion cost me the opportunity to locate the company earlier). If you look at the Carrier-to-Enterprise application area of SBC or just the managed enterprise SBC implementation, this vendor seems ahead of the better known competitors in the segment.
Out of the 100 or so customers signed up by Covergence, about 20 are direct enterprise customers, and most of them are large ones including the world’s largest e-commerce company. The vendor has been successful in the promising enterprise market for SBCs for two main reasons: (1) It implemented standard hardware solution in form of IBM Blade Center much early, and (2) the roots of Covergence SBC product can be traced back to enterprise SIP security solution.
Very few SBC vendors approached the VoIP security problem from the enterprise SIP security perspective. While NexTone roots can be traced back to a softswitch type product, Acme Packet started off as a programmable firewall product. Anyway, these two vendors have mostly been selling in the Carrier-to-Carrier peering scenario. And that application area of SBC has fetched majority of the revenues so far. However it is the Carrier-to-Enterprise application area of SBC and the managed enterprise SBC part which is supposed to be hot now.