Convergence Inc. Got $15 million in Series D funding

What Company Is Offering:
SBCs provide a means of interfacing VoIP traffic between service providers (the peering edge) or connecting users to their real-time services (the access edge). SBCs perform a variety of functions that may include NAT traversal, topology hiding, acting as a firewall for SIP traffic, or cooperating with the existing firewall, Denial-of-Service attack prevention, call routing, codec transcoding, protocol interworking, lawful intercept and other critical functions that are necessary to deliver a quality user experience over an IP network.

Covergence is the creator of Eclipse, the industry's first session border controller specifically designed to address the unique requirements of the VoIP access edge. The core of the development and leadership team has spent their careers working in the network equipment industry at companies such as Shiva, Cascade, Aptis, Bay Networks, Nortel, Tiburon Networks and other leading organizations. While this team has had a hand in creating almost every type of network solution imaginable, they are experts in solving high-performance routing and access problems found within the Global 2000 and service providers.

What's Market Of That Kind Of Product:
The first phase of VoIP has been reached as carriers have replaced their traditional TDM transport networks and Class 4 switches with more economical IP transport and softswitches. As a result a large percentage of long distance voice transport now relies on Session Border Controllers (SBCs) to manage peering between service providers. But a peering SBC may not meet the requirements found at the access edge. The access edge SBC has to process registration traffic, manage registration floods, authenticate users, protect the service from intrusions and attacks, encrypt and decrypt signaling and media, enforce user-defined policies, and manage thousands-to-millions of active endpoints - with negligible latency, jitter and loss. This is the reason the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standard defines both an access-edge and peering-edge SBC.
How Much They Got From VCs:
Convergence Inc., a Maynard, Mass.-based provider of IP communications security, has raised $15 million in Series D funding. Backers include Highland Capital Partners, Globespan Capital Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
More at:http://www.covergence.com/