Covergence, the leader in scaling and securing access to VoIP and other real-time services based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), announced the availability of its secure SIP trunking solution for customers using Avaya’s IP telephony products. Delivered through its Eclipse family of SIP security solutions, Covergence's secure SIP trunking solution enables enterprises using Avaya's SIP Enablement Services (SES) to securely connect their Avaya Communication Manager (CM) platforms to an IP network. With the Covergence solution in place, enterprises can quickly and easily implement secure VoIP throughout their organizations, yielding significant cost savings, while protecting all user information through comprehensive application-level security to defend their VoIP service from attacks and intrusions, even over untrusted networks.

Voice service is a mission-critical capability for all organizations, and as more and more enterprises turn to VoIP services and IP telephony platforms to handle their communication needs, they need the assurance that access to these services will not expose the enterprise to security threats that can compromise the business. The reliability and availability of these services is essential for users within and outside the organizations to realize the benefits of VoIP in the enterprise. Without a secure connection, these organizations could potentially open themselves up to service issues, intrusions and attacks – hacks, viruses, dropped calls and other forms of disruption – that could lead to service and data theft and potentially take down their networks.

With its recent designation as “Avaya Compliant,” Covergence can now solve this challenge by offering its Eclipse SIP security and management solutions for customers using Avaya IP telephony products. With Covergence’s SIP trunking solution, customers can immediately move their telephony traffic onto an IP network to eliminate toll charges and redundant management and administration costs, while securely deploying real-time services between the service provider and enterprise or between geographically disperse sites within the enterprise, and secure connections to remote Avaya handsets located in branch offices. Covergence’s Eclipse provides Avaya customers with fully authenticated, validated and encrypted connections to protect all user information, plus comprehensive application-level security to defend the service from attacks and intrusions.

Additionally, Eclipse’s clustering capabilities provide load balancing for consistent performance, and redundancy for high availability through automatic IP rerouting that maintains the availability of VoIP trunks through most wide-area network failures. If the central site becomes unreachable or VoIP service fails, Eclipse provides local call completion within remote sites and diverts external calls to the PSTN. The Eclipse also offers central quality of service (QoS) monitoring, service-level agreement (SLA) verification and other management tools that give network operators the information they need to maintain availability and performance integrity.

“As VoIP continues its move into the mainstream for business communications, linking users together throughout the entire organization will require solutions able to span the continuum of connections required to do so,” said Bob O’Neil, CEO of Covergence. “With our ability to work with leading VoIP applications, solutions and platforms, we are enabling Avaya customers to implement secure SIP trunks today – even over untrusted networks – connecting their entire enterprise together.”

The Eclipse family of products is purpose-built to provide comprehensive security and control for VoIP and other SIP applications, with models already in use today providing secure SIP trunks for large enterprises using some of the most popular enterprise VoIP platforms and services, such as Avaya’s SIP Enablement Services and Communications Manager. And because all Eclipse models provide intrusion and attack prevention as well as support the standard for secure signaling (TLS) and the standard for secure media (SRTP), customers can deploy fully encrypted, validated and authenticated SIP trunks without any changes to their existing infrastructure. For more information on the Eclipse, including additional features and benefits, please visit www.covergence.com, or call (978) 823-5200.