Acme Packet Adds Business Continuity to Thing5’s Hospitality Industry Voice Services
Combination of SBCs at Thing5 Data Center with Service Provider SIP Trunk SBCs Delivers Geo-Redundancy for Site Disaster Recovery and Load Balancing
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Acme Packet® (NASDAQ:APKT), the leader in session border control solutions, today announced that Thing5 L.L.C., a leading provider of voice and data messaging services to the hospitality industry, is deploying additional Acme Packet session border controllers (SBCs) to add geo-redundancy to the company’s managed interactive communication services. The new configuration adds business continuity to Thing5’s delivery of advanced, secure voice communications for more than one thousand hotel properties, including all LaQuinta and Extended Stay hotels.
Building on the October 2007 announcement between the two companies, Thing5 is deploying Acme Packet Net-Net Session Directors (SD), an integrated SBC with multi-protocol signaling and media control capabilities, in data centers located in Miami, Fla., and Springfield, Mass., in a high-availability configuration in order to ensure the accessibility of its network. Combining the benefits of Acme Packet SDs at the data center with the SIP trunking service from a global tier one service provider also using Acme Packet SDs in its network, Thing5 adds data center load balancing, failover and disaster recovery for voice traffic.
Acme Packet’s Net-Net SDs enable Thing5’s messaging network to provide communications services to hundreds of thousands of hotel employees and guests in locations across the United States. Interconnecting data centers with SIP trunks presents unique challenges in securing connections at network borders. The Net-Net SDs deliver critical overload protection for balancing of calls between Thing5’s two geographically-diverse data centers. For further network resiliency, the SIP trunks are each connected to a logically-distinct private MPLS network, adding service provider network diversity without requiring the use of multiple service providers.
In recent months, more enterprises like Thing5 have been embracing SIP trunking for a number of reasons, including lower call termination costs, elimination of costly media gateways and TDM trunks, faster trunk provisioning and the addition of geo-redundancy to VoIP services. But SIP trunks also bring challenges related to security, vendor interoperability and voice quality. The Acme Packet Net-Net SD, an integrated SBC with multi-protocol signaling and media control capabilities, addresses these issues by securing the service provider border, mediating incompatibilities between the service provider and enterprise IP telephony infrastructure, and ensuring the performance and availability of VoIP services. Further, using the Net-Net SD’s SIP routing capabilities, incoming traffic can be routed to various hotel properties, eliminating the need for existing standalone SIP proxies, allowing further consolidation of network infrastructure.
“Acme Packet SBCs provide Thing5 with the security, performance and scalability needed to deliver high-quality VoIP services to hotel employees and guests,” said Bill Faxon, senior director of product development, Thing5. “Having first deployed this service last year in our Massachusetts data center, we’ve incorporated additional Acme Packet SBCs in our network to enable geo-redundancy, cost savings and call feature enhancements, as well as to ensure our network delivers high performance, security and availability.”
“Acme Packet provides extensive security features and network protection, while enabling interoperability among different vendor equipment and protocols, which is imperative in SIP trunking environments,” explained Seamus Hourihan, Acme Packet’s vice president of marketing and product management. “Thing5 continues to turn to Acme Packet to enable the delivery of trusted, high-quality SIP-based solutions.”
About Acme Packet
Acme Packet, Inc. (NASDAQ: APKT), the leader in session border control solutions, enables the delivery of trusted, first class interactive communications—voice, video and multimedia sessions—and data services across IP network borders. Our Net-Net family of session border controllers, multiservice security gateways and session routing proxies supports multiple applications in service provider, large enterprise and contact center networks—from VoIP trunking to hosted enterprise and residential services to fixed-mobile convergence. They satisfy critical security, service assurance and regulatory requirements in wireline, cable and wireless networks; and support multiple protocols—SIP, H.323, MGCP/NCS and H.248—and multiple border points—interconnect, access and data center. Our products have been selected by more than 500 customers in 85 countries, including 29 of the top 30, and 84 of the top 100 service providers in the world. For more information, contact us at +1 781.328.4400, or visit http://www.acmepacket.com.
About Thing5 L.L.C.
Thing5 L.L.C. is a provider of next-generation hosted voice solutions, including out- and in-bound calling, delivered on a highly scalable and geographically redundant platform. The company’s solutions are delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), offering better security and control, as well as expertise in telecommunications solutions. Thing5 is currently serving over 1,400 locations, 300,000+ end-points (phones) and millions of calls per month. For more information, visit http://www.thing5.com.
For more on VoIP Services for business, please see our VoIP Services Buyer’s Guide