Large enterprises have been expanding their deployments of IP telephony (IPT) for several years now. Planning has already begun to extend the benefits of interactive communications over IP beyond voice services to include real-time presence-based voice, videoconferencing, chat/instant messaging, multimedia collaboration, telepresence, and more.

Delivering these real-time, interactive communications services and applications over IP will be critical to fostering business agility, boosting employee accessibility and efficiency, improving customer service, and reducing IT capital and operating costs. But significant challenges in security, interoperability, service assurance and regulatory compliance emerge once enterprises begin migrating voice and video away from service provider TDM services and converging them on IP networks.

Session border controllers (SBCs), product solutions extensively used by service providers to address these shortcomings, are now being deployed by enterprises to enable the delivery of secure, high-quality, real-time interactive communications, including IPT and UC. Similarly, service providers are using SBCs in new outsourced interactive communications offerings for enterprises such as hosted contact centers and hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) services.