Cisco Captures Lead in Enterprise SBC Market According to New Infonetics 2012 Market Share Report

According to Infonetics Research, Cisco captured the lead in the enterprise session border controller (SBC) market, taking 26 percent revenue market share in the first half of 2012. Worldwide revenue for enterprise SBCs is estimated to have hit about $82.5 million in the first half of 2012 and is forecasted to top $430 million by 2016. Today the top two enterprise SBC competitors are Cisco and Acme Packet. In their report, Infonetics credited Cisco’s differentiated model for delivering SIP trunking service, stating: “This is a natural extension of Cisco’s dominant market position in the router market – the majority of organizations have Cisco routers already installed and deployed at the important network border points.”

As an integrated Cisco IOS Software application, the Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) runs on a broad range of Cisco router platforms, including the Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs), the Cisco AS5350XM and AS5400XM Universal Gateways, and the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASRs). CUBE terminates and re-originates both signaling (H.323 and SIP) and media streams (Real-Time Transport Protocol [RTP] and RTP Control Protocol [RTCP]) while performing border interconnection services between IP networks. Its feature set supports the transition to SIP trunking:

• Session management: The capability to count and manage the number of sessions flowing through a router
  
  
• Interworking: The capability to interconnect different signaling methods and variants
  
  
• Demarcation: The capability to act as a distinct demarcation point between two networks
  
  
• Security: The capability to intelligently allow or disallow real-time traffic between networks

In summary, CUBE provides key session management capabilities, H.323 and SIP interworking functions, and network-to-network interface security and demarcation capabilities.

The key to customer demand for CUBE is closely tied to: (1) their availability as a software license add-on to the widely deployed Cisco ISR and ASR routers; and (2) the ability for customers to repurpose Cisco routers to adapt to the changing needs of their businesses. Beyond routing and session border control, Cisco routers can also deliver other critical services, such as TDM gateways, call processing (Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express) or branch survivability in the same box. Bottom line: Cisco SBC/router integration offers customers architectural flexibility with an asset already in place in over 85% of branches worldwide.

With architectural flexibility at hand businesses can maintain their current distributed TDM architecture, get comfortable with SIP trunking technology and migrate to a central datacenter environment over time, if that’s what you want to do, while retaining some degree of telephony control in the branch, as well, for survivability. And with things like video and other technologies coming down the pike, that architectural flexibility is going to be really important.

What This Means to Partners

First, there are certainly upselling opportunities. As Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research put it: “Cisco’s been able to turn its market-leading position in IP PBXs into an advantage, selling its enterprise SBCs with new IP PBX, VoIP gateways, and data networking equipment into an advantage, upselling its enterprise SBCs to this customer base as they transition to services such as SIP trunking.”

There are also partner solution design opportunities. Take SecureLogix which recently announced the availability of ETM System v7.0 which integrates the company's voice/UC network security, fraud prevention, policy enforcement, and intelligence solutions with Cisco ISRs and voice gateways. According to company officials, SecureLogix voice-policy applications can be run on Cisco UCS Express allowing SecureLogix solutions to sit directly on the Cisco ISR alongside the Cisco TDM gateway and/or Cisco CUBE, providing a single, multiservice SIP/VoIP/TDM trunking enablement solution.

BT Global Services has leveraged Cisco ISRs and ASRs to deploy their BT Assure Security Service to fight voice and data threats in the enterprise. “Cisco is a natural partner to work with, not only because of the multi-service capabilities of the Cisco ISR and ASR, but also because of its market share leadership in routing, TDM Gateways and now for CUBE. It makes it easier to deploy our services as our customers are already familiar with Cisco,” said Mark Danton, Global Executive for the Business Continuity, Security and Governance at BT.