Versa extends SD-Branch capabilities to unified comms

Cloud IP platform can detect disruptions to user experience through a mean opinion score

Versa Networks has added voice and video functionality to its Cloud IP platform to extend its Software-Defined Branch activities.

SD-Branch is an enterprise bundle that brings together multiple functions, including SD-WAN, firewall, SaaS optimisation and routing. It was designed to enable a smooth transition away from legacy infrastructure and towards software-defined systems.

Versa's Cloud IP platform is part of the SD-Branch; a cloud-native, multi-service software for SD-networking. The company says, ‘The Versa Cloud IP Platform now features embedded voice and video codec support to provide native mean opinion score (MOS)-based traffic engineering and reporting for unified communications (UC) services (voice and video)'.

As well as supporting these new communication methods, the company has added functions to identify what it calls ‘business-class' voice and video traffic. The aim is to address problems with SD-WAN solutions, which don't assess user experience in real time; they tend to be limited to following policy guidelines related to factors such as loss, latency and jitter.

The new functionality means that the platform can identify problems and assess the user experience through a MOS score. Versa claims that using real-time MOS data in an SD-WAN will enable enterprises to deploy services with close to 100 per cent uptime.

Versa uses the following features to analyse voice and video traffic:

• The ability to create MOS-based voice and video traffic-steering policies to provide the best user experience across the WAN end-to-end;
• The ability to decode and encode voice and video traffic streams to further extrapolate additional quality information in real time based on embedded MOS data;
• Native real-time and historical reporting and analysis of voice and video quality based on MOS and codec type to enhance the quality of critical services;
• Dynamic distribution and sharing of MOS metrics to all nodes within the SD-WAN to ensure end-to-end optimisation based on the user's voice and video experience.