Covergence launches virtual appliance

New offering from Covergence runs on VMWare's Player applications

Comms vendor Covergence has launched what it claims to be the first session border controller (SBC) "wrapped up" as a virtual appliance.

The Covergence Virtual Appliance 50 (CVA-50) is a pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise SBC integrated with an operating system inside a virtual machine.

Covergence marketing vice president, Rod Hodgman, said, “We provide a system [with] a single point of policy-based integration, control, security and management for session initiation protocol (SIP) applications. We normally deliver this as a hardened appliance, but we’ve had requests from customers wanting to use this on other platforms, particularly in enterprises.”

The first implementation runs on VMware’s Player application and Hodgman said the firm has reduced the functionality to that which is normally required by service providers. The CVA-50 is aimed at enterprise branch offices and service providers who service SMBs. Customers can now run this session management software on commodity x86-hardware, for ease of deployment for multiple branch offices or SMBs.

Covergence said the expected savings in long distance, local and intra-company calls and audio conferencing minutes would be considerable when compared to hardware solutions such as an IP PBX.

Covergence said one of the top five financial services firms with around 200,000 employees and 3,000 offices is using the system. It needed to move real-time traffic onto its IP network to reduce costs, deploy unified communications and integrate real-time services into its existing business applications.

The appliance costs $5,000 and is available now.