Service providers are looking to IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) to define the architecture and standards that support the delivery of new revenue-generating services. But competitive forces are driving many service providers to deliver real-time services now, while they simultaneously plan and execute the evolution of their infrastructure toward full IMS compliance. As a result many service providers will not jump directly to IMS; they will proceed in phases. Covergence Session Manager enables service providers to increase subscribers and create new sources of revenue by extending their service portfolios beyond VoIP through the rapid deployment of Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS)

Hosted Office Communications Server (OCS) / Live Communications Server (LCS)

Microsoft Live Communication Server (LCS) is an enterprise real-time collaboration (RTC) system that supports presence-enabled instant messaging, audio, video, white-boarding and application sharing. The network protocol used for client/server communication in LCS is based on the IETF’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), with Microsoft-specific extensions. This makes LCS a potentially ideal solution for service providers to deliver new, high-value services to business customers.

Third Party Call Control for Office Communicator

The Covergence Remote Call Control provides complete subscriber edge management (security, control, monitoring and interoperability) functions in addition to uaCSTA gateway services between Microsoft Live Communications Server and VoIP application platforms from BroadSoft, Sylantro and others.The solution supports all Office Communicator remote call control functions and can be extended to support its remote conference control functions. Covergence Session Manager's high availability clustering capability enables the solution to scale up to carrier-class levels of performance and availability.

A Valuable Offering for Service Providers

The Covergence family of Session Managers enable providers to deliver new, revenue-generating services. But when selling to the business customer, its more than delivering the multimedia services, its how you deliver them. Covergence Session Manager allows you to deliver "business-grade" services that meet the security, reliability and quality requirements of high-value business customers. Today. Not some future release. Right now.

Click here to get the Covergence LCS/OCS solution presentation.

Case Study

This service provider—one of the largest in the world—determined that competitive market pressure made it necessary to extend its service portfolio beyond conventional telephony to include IM, presence, email and conferencing to both mobile and fixed-line users. In this particular case, email service was provisioned via Microsoft Exchange while the IM, presence and conferencing were provisioned using Microsoft Office Live Communications Server (LCS).

So while they needed all of the functions normally found in an SBC—NAT traversal, topology hiding, call admission control, etc.—they also needed to address a new set of application-level requirements that arise at the access edge. The critical requirements were outside the scope of a traditional SBC and included:

• Endpoint VoIP support for hard phones, softphones and Microsoft Office Communicator, with PC-based call control from Microsoft Office Communicator and Microsoft Office applications—with assured interoperability across their diverse endpoints.
• Support for multi-modal realtime collaboration including peer-to-peer audio, video, instant messaging, presence, file transfer, etc. based on Microsoft Live Communication Server (LCS).
• The ability to exercise finely grained, policy-based control to restrict the types of SIP messages and SIP-associated media streams that cross the network edge. For example, some subscribers could be restricted to voice services while others would have access to voice and video services.
• The ability to record the content of instant messaging (text chat), audio and video sessions, under policy-based control, to enable organizations to allow customers to comply with regulations pertaining to the monitoring and recording of electronic communications.
• The ability to provision both authenticated, validated, and encrypted (TLS and SRTP) connections and unencrypted (SIP/UDP and RTP) connections.
• The ability to scale new services predictably to a very large and growing user population. Since each user may invoke several applications simultaneously, support for active sessions must scale faster than the subscriber count.
• The ability to deliver PSTN-like quality and reliability consistently that its customers expect across all realtime services.

This scenario is not unique as service providers around the world begin the process of planning or trialing the delivery of multimedia services beyond VoIP. And as they move into deployment each and every one of them experiences the constraints and limitations that arise by applying a traditional peering edge SBC to the problems of the access edge.

If it's time for your organization to expand its service portfolio, call or email us. We know the way.