SBC Vendor Edgewater Branches Out To The Data Center: Page 2 of 2

Among the unique features of EdgeProtect, says Arnold, is the dual-appliance tunneling approach, which could mitigate some of the complex corporate firewall policies needed to support access to UC applications for remote workers. However, this ease of traversing corporate firewalls and tunneling traffic directly may put the onus to monitor and secure that traffic on the enterprises' UC support staff, rather than on the enterprise security team.

Overall, this improves Edgewater's ability to vie for the increasing number of enterprise accounts that are moving communications servers into central sites while securing connections to branch locations, where EdgeMarc is proven, he adds. "A number of alternative vendors that focus on only one of these aspects will be challenged to compete against Edgewater's more comprehensive solutions."

Analyst Rich Ptak, managing partner, Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC, thinks the biggest strength of the new offering is its built-in, integrated, simple-to-implement, -apply and -use approach to managing devices at the edge. "I think simplicity in multiple dimensions is going to be a key competitive advantage for the next few years. As the underlying technology and problem solving becomes more complex, the solutions to handle that complexity have to be more accessible."

Edgewater's architecture fits nicely into the existing data center, says Ptak. It complements rather than competes or conflicts with existing management infrastructures, and puts the company in a very strong position. "I think that they have a leg up on the competition because of the depth of integration and straightforward simplicity in use and access."