Story by Charlotte Wolter
One of the most enduring companies on the VoIP scene, NexTone, has merged with and Reef Point Systems, a provider of mobile access gateways, to form NextPoint Networks.
The merger is planned to join, not just the names, but also the products of the two companies to create a connectivity platform, called the Integrated Border Gateway, that bridges fixed and mobile networks.
Reef Point CEO Woody Ritchey was named CEO of the new company. The new entity launches with a $20 million war chest from a group of investors led by One Equity Partners, the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase, and supported by American Capital, Core Capital Partners, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Safeguard Scientifics and Summerhill Venture Partners.
Seven-year-old Reef Point had developed a product that became important as fixed-mobile convergence developed, says Mark Pugerude, chief marketing officer, NextPoint. As part of IMS, service providers were attracted to "the idea of a security gateway at the edge," He says."And it was not just the security issue but the scale issue. Most tier-one network providers looked for a network element that could handle hundreds of thousands of IP sec tunnels at the edge, so each transmitted at wireline speed and could
apply policy to IP Sec tunnels."
That focuses on layers two and three of a typical network. What NexTone brought to the table with its session border controller was security and control at higher layers, such as network signaling and even applications. A session border controller "has NAT traversal and interconnection for end devices into a terminating device. So it is like a voice firewall," says Pugerude. "On top of that it is allowing SIP traffic signaling, and it can pull billing records and call records."
One target market of the new company's products is the femtocell deployments that some operators are gearing up. Femtocells are small mobile base stations installed typically in a home to enable good connectivity for mobile devices. They are usually connected to broadband. Operators typically plan to offer consumers lower price points for use of mobile devices on their home networks than while mobile.
"The new part is that the handsets ultimately are going to be IP end points. As move to IP end points, they start to look like ATAs in mobile VoIP or SIP trunking end users," Pugerude explains. So you need intelligence at the end to manage those sessions or bill for sessions."
NextPoint's investors "saw this combination attacking a huge market segment of tier-one carriers," Pugerude asserts. The advantage the company will offer is "a combination of security and scale with policy management" for very large service providers.
NexTone began as one of the early softswitch providers in VoIP, and it garnered a loyal clientele among smaller service providers in the United States and overseas. Later, as softswitch functions became subsumed into gateways, the company migrated its technology to provide functions that fit more into the mold of session border controller. The combination with Reef Point brings those capabilities to mobile provider, which more and more find themselves dealing with IP end points.
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