One benefit, according to Sonus's announcement Tuesday, is that the two pieces of equipment could work together with the Juniper SRC Policy Engine to enforce service level agreements (SLAs) in real time.

Sonus isn't replacing the SBC Juniper currently provides for its routers, a Juniper spokesman tells Light Reading.

But the companies say they'll integrate Sonus's SBCs with the JunosV App Engine, an x86 card for adding other companies' services onto Juniper's routers. So, it sounds like Sonus SBCs, or some piece of their functionality, could eventually be available on cards for the MX.

None of this stuff is available just yet. The Sonus 5000 and MX router pairing is being demonstrated at Juniper's labs.

Why this matters
While this could be seen as part of Juniper's overall SDN "framework," it's really more like a specific SDN application: monitoring and policing of unified communications. That's OK. SDN is supposedly all about the applications, but the same ones keep coming up (bandwidth on demand, in particular). This is an interesting case of companies getting together to try to make new applications happen.

Juniper has a bit of history with SBCs. It acquired Kagoor in 2005 but discontinued that standalone product a year later, and in 2009, it started integrating SBC functionality into the MX and M-series routers.

For more

• Juniper's SDN Jumps Into Cloudscaling
• What Applications Will Want From SDN
• Interop Photos: SDN Keynote Frenzy

— Craig Matsumoto, Managing Editor, Light Reading