Edgewater Networks Eyeing the Untapped SMB Market for eSBC Solutions

Traditionally an enterprise session border controller (SBC) company, Edgewater Networks has been increasingly focused on putting more intelligence at the edge of the network. The move to the intelligent edge gives the company’s service provider and enterprise customers invaluable information about what’s happening with their voice networks as well as an eagle eye view of their own customers’ networks.

TMC CEO Rich Tehrani recently sat down with Rosa Lear, director of marketing at Edgewater, at the Editors Day Santa Clara 2015 event. Lear said that while the company has traditionally focused on the enterprise, Edgewater has begun to target small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with its intelligent edge solutions.

“We’re adding a lot of intelligence to the edge so that our customers, our service providers, are able to deliver a seamless experience to their customers,” said Lear. The company’s EdgeView platform gives service providers insights into their customers’ networks as well as providing important information on packet loss, jitter and approximately 40 parameters impacting the quality of their voice networks.

By combining an intelligent eSBC at the network edge along with comprehensive software in the cloud, Edgewater is able to offer their customers a comprehensive monitoring and analytics package. The company has recently turned its attention to the SMB space after conducting a study with Metaswitch Networks on this growing market. The companies found that the addressable market for hosted IP services in SMBs is $26 billion annually, creating massive opportunities.

“A huge area of growth is the hosted PBX market,” said Lear. “Right now we’re focused a lot on the SMB as well as the enterprise, but the SMB we see opening up a lot.”

Edgewater has also been focused on growth and expansion, and in November signed a deal with SoftBank Corp. to deliver managed services in Japan. The companies are working together to integrate Edgewater eSBCs into SoftBank’s managed unified communications platform. The move will enable the service provider to offer customers a single appliance for handling IP trunking and remote access for UC.