Acme Packet, a provider of session border control products, said it is involved in more than 100 IP-Multimedia Subsystem deployment projects, with European providers accounting for 50% of the IMS efforts. That figure is followed by 22% in Asia-Pacific, 15% in Central & South America and 13% in North America. Interestingly, nearly two-thirds of its IMS projects deliver services only to wireline access networks.

Current Analysis ranks the vendor’s Net-Net 4000 family first among its peers for IMS and protocol support, and for customer traction. “Acme Packet is an industry leader in the stand-alone SBC market in multiple categories and a trendsetter in terms of supporting emerging architectures, protocols, interfaces and deployment scenarios,” said Joe McGarvey, principal analyst for Current Analysis. “Acme Packet’s support of IMS standards and broad range of early IMS customers puts the company in a strong position among competitive suppliers.”

Seamus Hourihan, vice president of marketing and product management for Acme Packet noted that: ‘While IMS architectural blueprints don’t explicitly specify the need for a ‘session border controller’ by that name, our survey results show that our customers believe otherwise. The session border controller is the right product to perform all of the IMS network access and interconnect edge functions and satisfy several critical requirements missing from IMS in the areas of security, overload control, enterprise service delivery, and overall resiliency and scalability.”

Our observation: We agree with Hourihan (and his survey respondents) that session border control functionality is critical to IMS deployments because the stateful packet inspection and security it provides are very much needed as service providers seek to establish the interconnect boundaries between carriers and between the carrier and the enterprise network. Multimedia services session control isn’t as hierarchical or centralized as traditional signaling protocols such as signaling system 7 (SS7), and the concept of a punch-down block serving as the boundary between networks disappears when IP, SIP, and IMS are used by multiple end-points to share control of the session. While we don’t much care if the SBC functionality is contained in a single box or spread throughout multiple devices on the network, the SBC functionality provided must be in place as IMS-controlled networking evolves and expands.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.