SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Acme Packet®, the leader in session border control solutions, today announced IMS Enterprise (IMS-E), the most comprehensive collection of capabilities for enabling delivery of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) services to wireline enterprise customers. IMS-E builds upon the functionality foundation that Acme Packet has deployed with its customers in its Net-Net family of session border controllers and is available now.

IMS, the architecture defined by 3GPP for the delivery of real-time voice, video and multimedia services using SIP signaling over packet-switched networks, is exclusively focused on mobile wireless access networks. This architecture is being extended by ETSI TISPAN to more completely satisfy the service delivery requirements in fixed wireline access networks. However, even the TIPSAN architecture has yet to satisfy all the requirements associated with delivering services to enterprises.

Acme Packet’s IMS-E supplies the missing capabilities for enterprise IMS service delivery. More specifically, IMS-E includes support for eight enterprise-specific requirements:

“While enterprises generate the most profits for communications service providers today, IMS is functionally deficient in enabling service delivery to their most valuable customers,” stated Seamus Hourihan, Acme Packet’s vice president of marketing and product management. “Acme Packet’s IMS-E fills the gaping holes to maximize our customers’ return-on-IMS (ROI).”

In another news release:

Acme Packet® will demonstrate key components of Net-SAFE™ (Session Aware Filtering and Enforcement), a comprehensive set of security capabilities for its session border controllers (SBCs), this week at Spring 2006 VON Conference and Exhibition in San Jose, California. Net-SAFE, announced and validated last year, is critical in Acme Packet deployments at over 220 service providers around the world. Acme Packet Net-Net® SBCs are uniquely able to defend themselves and the service provider’s infrastructure from attack and overload.

“The deployment of IMS architectures will require bullet-proof security to be successful. However, protection against DoS and DDoS attacks is not even addressed by IMS, ETSI TISPAN, MSF or any other next-gen architecture,” declared Seamus Hourihan, Acme Packet VP of product management & marketing. “Our session border controllers provide the protection required by service providers to deliver trusted, first class IMS services.”

The Net-Net® SBC security features on display next week include SBC self-protection against denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks, access control, topology hiding, and service infrastructure DoS and overload prevention. As verified by testing last year at CT Labs, the Net-Net SBC provides an extremely robust level of security for service providers with respect to a wide range of potential attacks designed to degrade or destroy voice-over-IP (VoIP) services.

Using third party test equipment and a distributed DDoS attack tool, the Acme Packet demonstration will show dynamically registering endpoints successfully making and receiving calls even while the SIP core network is under a massive DDoS attack. The attack will be generated from thousands of random IP addresses flooding the SBC with SIP REGISTER and INVITE messages at rates of 130,000 messages per second, while dynamically trusted endpoints generate legitimate calls into the SIP core. This is considered by experts to be the most difficult type of attack scenario to defend against and only Acme Packet’s SBCs have proven to defend against it, using its unique hardware capabilities.

Empirix will provide its Hammer FX feature testing platform to emulate realistic call traffic, both signaling and media, and provide a graphical display of calls generated during the attack. CT Labs will also be available to discuss Acme Packet’s Net-Net SBC performance in the testing last year, as well as to certify the validity of the demonstration.

Acme Packet Inc. (Nasdaq: APKT)