September 27, 2012

DoubleHorn Communications Announces Virtualized Solution

By Rachel Ramsey
TMCnet Web Editor

DoubleHorn Communications, a provider of business communications services, turnkey cloud business applications and managed services, recently announced a virtualized solution that bundles SIP trunking and enterprise-grade Session Border Controllers (SBC). SIP trunks can offer significant cost-savings for enterprises, eliminating the need for local PSTN gateways, costly ISDN BRIs (Basic Rate Interfaces) or PRIs (Primary Rate Interfaces).

The virtualized solution delivers ‘one click’ SIP trunk provisioning with elastic capacity for providers and enterprises needing secure, interoperable and tightly integrated session-based communications with Unified Communications (UC) providers such as MicroSoft Lync, Avaya (News - Alert), Shoretel and others. The solution will be available via DoubleHorn’s new Integrated Applications and Processes Platform (iAPP), an innovative online Cloud Services Marketplace that simplifies the purchasing, auto-provisioning and business process monitoring of cloud-based solutions. 

“We have virtualized the SBC marketplace,” said DoubleHorn CEO Tab Schadt, in a statement. “There was an opportunity to bring greater efficiency and scalability to session-based communications deployments by removing the burden of capital investment and time intense deployments, while enabling buyers to only purchase the capacity they need.”

Organizations challenged with bring your own device management that need to enable UC applications such as video, voice and mobile can deploy the capacity they need almost instantly. According to Schadt, “What we’ve done is similar to the transformation in the data and storage market. We’re doing for telco infrastructure what Rackspace did for data storage and hosting.”

DoubleHorn selected Acme Packet (News - Alert) as its partner for the virtualized solution. “Acme’s broad market penetration made them an obvious early participant in our cloud services marketplace,” said Schadt.

Earlier this year, Acme Packet unveiled a series of products for its session delivery network portfolio, introducing virtualization-based SBC systems for both enterprises and service providers. The Net-Net Enterprise Session Director-Virtual Machine Edition and the Net-Net Session Director-Virtual Machine Edition enable service providers and enterprises to optimize their network architectures by installing Acme Packet’s software on a dedicated or virtualized server

Acme Packet is just one participant in DoubleHorn’s new cloud services marketplace, which also includes Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (News - Alert). The platform’s debut module is an online Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) ‘storefront,’ which includes pre-integrated, tested and certified virtualized services by industry-leading business communications providers such as Acme Packet. Created from patent-pending technologies, the marketplace platform enables businesses to select the right services and provision them without the overhead of an IT organization, integration headaches or technology transition costs.

The platform is ideal for organizations migrating to UC and seeking a hosted, secure, interoperable and cost-effective platform to procure and provision cloud-based services. For cloud services brokers, the platform offers the opportunity to provide the best of cloud services, bundled with existing software and service assets, as a managed service to their customers.

According to Vice President of Platform Development Robert Erickson, “Our goal is to provide the most efficient marketplace with countless marketplace ‘tenants’, not to be the provider of all services. Instead, we are leveraging our domain knowledge to focus on building the best marketplace available.”

Cloud services and solutions play a critical role in the cloud ecosystem. With the cloud comes increased complexities and an increased need for integration, aggregation and automation capabilities. This is a disruptive change for both business and IT, and constitutes a series of challenges, coupled with new requirements. Leveraging the cloud requires more than just technology and platform migration. It requires a common platform across providers to design, build and operate a solution with a single point of accountability and transparency to enable successful transition to the cloud model. 

Erickson will be speaking at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Austin 2012, the world’s largest communications and technology event held in Austin, TX Oct. 2-5. Erickson is speaking in a session titled, “Leveraging Cloud Solutions in a Service Broker Model,” which will provide an overview of how innovative cloud brokerage technologies are helping streamline cloud sorucing, procurement, on-boarding, integration, aggregation, billing and use of different cloud services for cost savings, centralized management and increased control.

DoubleHorn will preview and demonstrate the virtualized SIP trunk and SBC solution, purchased and provisioned via the iAPP Cloud Services Marketplace at ITEXPO. Demonstrations will be available at the DoubleHorn booth #707. Previews are also available by contacting DoubleHorn at 855-61-VOICE. General availability of the virtualized solution and the marketplace is expected for the fourth quarter of calendar year 2012.

DoubleHorn is a gold sponsor of ITEXPO Austin 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. Robert Erickson, vice president of platform development and DoubleHorn, will be speaking at “Leveraging Cloud Solutions in a Service Broker Model.” To find out more about the company, visit DoubleHorn at booth #707. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO. Follow us on Twitter.

Edited by Rachel Ramsey