Covergence Session Manager Overview

Covergence Session Manager is the most comprehensive solution available for controlling, managing and protecting SIP-based applications and services. It extends the traditional SBC feature set with powerful management capability and unique policy-driven routing, control, monitoring, and security, to ensure that all real-time applications meet the customer’s security, compliance and business requirements.

CSM enables enterprises and service providers to:

• Ensure the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of all real-time communications
• Protect the communications infrastructure from intrusions and attacks
• Define and enforce fine-grained policies for routing, security, control, monitoring and QoS management and integrate that control into communication-enabled applications
• Safely extend real-time services to employees, partners and others across untrusted networks
• Assure interoperability between a wide variety of application servers, soft-switches, terminal devices, and Instant Messaging and Presence systems, both within and beyond the firewall
• Dynamically handle call routing according to costs, gateway availability and QoS requirements, or any other customer-defined criteria.
• Scale to carrier-class levels of performance and reliability.

Key Features

Covergence Session Manager provides policy-based application-level routing that allows organizations to dynamically route information based on quality, cost, congestion, location and business rules through its web services interface. Adaptive routing optimizes quality, performance and reliability for real-time traffic being transmitted over IP networks.

Covergence Session Manager combats eavesdropping, theft of service, intrusion, denial of service and other attacks by securing real-time traffic and limiting access to the infrastructure that carries it. CSM authenticates SIP endpoints, encrypts SIP signaling and media traffic, and provides perimeter defenses which inspects and validates traffic while repelling denial of service attacks. CSM also prevents “flash floods” and “registration storms” from overwhelming soft-switches and application servers. CSM integrates with standard authentication repositories, including RADIUS servers, LDAP directories and SQL databases.

Covergence Session Manager provides superior policy-based control, monitoring and fault-tracing capabilities, for use with call routing, call detail recording and QoS management. As well as standard command line, web and SNMP interfaces, CSM allows customers to control every aspect of call management from within their own applications using Web Services. This allows organizations to develop web-enabled communications applications such as click-to-call; to provide custom call treatments, such as pre- and mid-call announcements; to control call routing decisions; to manipulate call signaling information; and to build flow-through provisioning for SIP-based applications.

The flexible and distributed architecture of Covergence Session Manager is the basis for high-availability clustering, load balancing and system scalability with carrier-class levels of reliability. Increased media and signaling traffic can be accommodated simply by adding additional units to existing CSM clusters. CSM helps scale other SIP infrastructure elements by throttling back registration traffic and relieving application servers of encryption duties, and promotes overall system availability by routing calls around server and gateway failures.

Covergence Session Manager acts as the glue between different SIP-based systems and devices from many different vendors, ensuring that presence availability, messaging and media flow unhindered and that organizations get the most from their investment in real-time communications and collaboration.