Covergence Session Manager delivers secure, “business-grade” VoIP and real-time services to enterprise customers

Maynard, MA - December 11, 2007 – Covergence®, the leading provider of next-generation Session Border Controller solutions, today announced that Mstar, Utah’s largest and fastest-growing fiber-optic service provider, has selected the Covergence Session Manager (CSM). CSM, a super set of traditional Session Border Controllers (SBCs), is designed specifically to address the challenges of the most vulnerable region of IP networks – the access edge. By deploying CSM along with New Global Telecom’s (NGT) Wholesale VoIP services platform, Mstar can deliver Voice over IP (VoIP) and other real-time services, ensuring that customers receive the secure, reliable access to communications service they require.

Now that more enterprises recognize the potential cost savings and productivity enhancements offered by VoIP and real-time communications, demand for these enhanced services continues to increase. As businesses move primary-line telephones to IP and seek offerings that combine voice services with video and other multimedia applications, demand for “toll-quality” connections is growing as well. In response, service providers like Mstar must be able to scale the access edge with consistency and predictability, and CSM is the industry's first session management solution designed to address this challenge.

Located where user SIP traffic first enters the network, CSM terminates, secures, controls and manages large numbers of user connections efficiently and effectively. The access edge is more difficult to scale than the network core and the network-to-network peering boundary, especially when providers are managing not just VoIP, but a whole host of real-time services. For example, a subscriber-edge system has to process registration traffic, secure subscriber connections and protect the internal network from intrusions, attacks and compromises.

“The access edge is susceptible to considerable threats and vulnerabilities when you’re delivering telephony, video and other real-time services,” said Kirk Tanner, Mstar’s chief operations and marketing officer. “CSM provides the scaling, controlling and monitoring capabilities that allow us to deploy new offerings securely in order to meet customers’ communications needs and continue to expand our fast-growing fiber-optic network.”

“Securing the access edge not only requires the ability to connect large numbers of untrusted users, but also involves the convergence of multiple types of real-time services such as VoIP, video and IM,” said Bob O’Neil, president and CEO, Covergence. “CSM is purpose-built to address the problems of the access edge for VoIP and all other real-time services, and therefore enables Mstar to deliver its offerings with full predictability.”

CSM is designed to meet the needs of small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) and scales its offerings all the way up to the world’s largest service providers, with recently-announced support for the IBM BladeCenter and industry-standard AdvancedTCA chassis. CSM also feeds critical performance and quality metrics to the management frameworks from IBM, HP and others to provide operations teams with the complete visibility and span-of-control they need. All CSM models are available from Covergence today and can be purchased by contacting sales@covergence.com or (+1) 978.823.5200.

For more information about Mstar, please visit www.mstar.net or call (877) 623-6006.

About Covergence
Covergence is the leader in scaling, securing and controlling VoIP and other real-time services. The award-winning Covergence Session Manager combines traditional session-border-control functionality with comprehensive security features and management tools. The Covergence Session Manager is purpose-built to securely and reliably connect users to VoIP and multi-media services while giving organizations the complete control and visibility they require.

About Mstar
Mstar is the nation’s leading provider of IP-based services and offers the fastest Internet, clearest TV and richest Phone package available over a fiber-optic network. Operating on world-class fiber-optic networks, Mstar brings cutting-edge convergence technology to the home and offers its customers the ultimate in bandwidth performance.


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For more information,

please contact:

Covergence:

Heather Sill

(+1)781.789.8907

hsill@covergence.com