As more businesses move from conventional voice services to VoIP-based offerings, the need for testing tools to ensure the reliable operation of session border controllers is growing among both enterprises and providers of VoIP services, according to the latest report published by Light Reading's VoIP Services Insider.

VoIP Growth Poses New Challenges for SBC Testing examines the SBC testing market, focusing on the network operator sector. It includes a comparative analysis of solutions that looks at specific tests provided, technologies utilized, competitive differentiators, and partners for each company. The report examines current and future market drivers, savings that can be achieved with the testing solutions, the benefits of testing solutions, and the challenges the market faces. This report also provides a competitive analysis of eight top vendors in the industry, including trends each vendor expects in the future.

"While SBCs have been deployed by network operators for a number of years now, they are experiencing a surge of interest at the enterprise level, as corporations of all sizes continue their migration toward VoIP and other IP-based applications," says Denise Culver, research analyst with Light Reading's VoIP Services Insider and author of the report. "As the number of installations grows, it is imperative that SBCs stay at the top of their game in terms of keeping networks secure, handling tasks such as network address translation and firewall traversal issues, protocol transcoding, and managing access to network resources by external traffic for service providers and enterprises."

Key findings of VoIP Growth Poses New Challenges for SBC Testing include the following:

• SBC vendors vary greatly in terms of how developed their testing solutions are and how they are utilized
• QoS, security issues, and SLA compliance are some of the market drivers behind the adoption of SBC testing
• Two of the top cost-saving measures from SBC testing are improved performance and reduced time to revenue
• SBC testing helps identify and isolate faults in the lab, keeping costs down
• As the SBC testing market matures, demand will grow for testing applications using more realistic network applications and traffic