The Growing Importance of Session Controllers

As a technology, session controllers have been around in the telecommunications services world as long as anybody can remember. But as the world shifts over to IP-based communications, the role of the session controller is starting to become more significant within the enterprise.

This is because as IT organizations embrace unified communications and video, they are becoming their own telecommunication service providers. And once you go down that path, you discover how important a little thing like a session controller can be.

For example, Acme Packet, a provider of Net-Net session controller software, rolled out an application session controller to help integrate video inside a Web application and an interactive session recorder that allows a session to be recorded for regulatory compliance purposes.

According to Steve Collins, vice president of marketing for Acme Packet, both of these capabilities are fairly routine offerings in the world of time-division multiplexing (TDM) where most services are provided by carriers. But in the brave new world of IP communication, the internal IT organization is going to need session controllers to effectively manage the delivery of unified communications across the enterprise.

Collins says how long that will continue will depend on whether unified communications is mainly delivered on premise or as a service. But with the proliferation of these services, the one thing that is for certain is that session controller software is ultimately going play a major factor in governing the delivery of these IP services one way or another.