Radware this week announced a new product designed to speed the handling of SIP-based applications. SIP Director is an application delivery controller (ADC) based on Radware's existing AppDirector technology. It's aimed at optimizing applications such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems, messaging servers, conferencing applications, media servers and 911 services.

“Whether it’s about video, voice, conferencing, instant messaging, presence, location -- SIP is becoming the de-facto standard for these next-generation collaboration applications,” says Roy Zisapel, Radware’s co-founder and CEO. 

SIP Director can perform health monitoring, failover and disaster recovery functions, as well as analyze SIP messages and route traffic based on service fulfillment and availability. “From a concept point of view, it is a combination of a load balancer, traffic manager and an intrusion prevention device for SIP applications,” Zisapel says.

Another key feature is the product’s ability to translate between common SIP transport mechanisms such as TCP, UDP and TLS. “We can be a bridge, or transformer, between a secure SIP world and a non-secure SIP world and enable SIP service delivery over encrypted tunnels, even with legacy conferencing or video applications,” he says.

On the security front, SIP Director protects users and networks from denial-of-service and other attacks and also provides privacy enablement features, Radware says.

Telecommunications service providers are always trying to evolve their service offerings, and Radware’s SIP Director can apply Layer 4-7 policies to help them optimize VoIP and other multimedia traffic flows, said Elisabeth Rainge, program director for VoIP infrastructure at research firm IDC.

In the big picture, SIP Director is the latest release in Radware’s plan to deliver tools for what it calls a “business-smart network.” 

“We are calling what we believe the next generation of the network will be, the ‘business-smart network,’ meaning a network that not only understands applications (which has been the focus of the current Layer 4-7 market, and the WAN optimization market, over the last three to five years) but also really understands user identity,” Zisapel says. “The network also needs to understand business events” and be able to distinguish between a Web visitor actively looking for a mortgage and one browsing the profiles of bank board members, for example.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.