Covergence®, Inc., the leading provider of software solutions that enable organizations to transition from legacy voice to voice as a web service on their IP network, today announced the availability of Covergence Session Manager (CSM). CSM is communications middleware that virtualizes multi-vendor PBXs and Unified Communications systems into a single cohesive service that reduces costs and improves productivity.
CSM sits in the core of the network and moves real-time policy enforcement; routing, control, monitoring and interoperability out of the individual PBXs and into a common SOA-based session layer. CSM’s SOA interfaces eliminate direct point-to-point communications between the clients and servers, making it much easier for organizations to reduce costs further through vendor consolidation and PBX centralization.
“Companies are collapsing voice and data networks in an effort to increase productivity, profitability and shareholder value,” said Covergence president and CEO Jim Moran. “Our customers want to greatly reduce the operating expense associated with managing voice and data as separate services. By creating this voice and data “cloud” service, organizations can cost-effectively deploy and manage voice like any IP application without replacing the existing infrastructure.”
CSM also provides a Web 2.0 capability to make it easy for web developers to integrate voice and presence into various applications. CSM provides a Representational State Transfer (REST) capability for building distributed systems using HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP.
“Voice as a UI capability can streamline complex business processes, dramatically improve the user experience, and reduce costs,” said Covergence CTO and Founder Ken Kuenzel. “CSM’s Web 2.0 support eliminates the need for developers with specialized computer-telephony integration (CTI) knowledge and makes voice-enabled applications accessible to the large and low cost web developer community.”
Another key feature of CSM is its compatibility with leading Web 2.0 development applications, including Google Gadgets and IBM sMash, two Web 2.0 component initiatives designed to make customization fast, simple and affordable. Google Gadgets and IBM sMash are mashup development environments designed to allow users with little or no technical experience to create customized applications.
CSM is the third data center solution from Covergence. Earlier in the year, the company announced the availability of the Covergence Call Control (CCC) and Covergence Collaboration Gateway. The Covergence Call Control extends enterprise PBX investments by incorporating them into Unified Communications (UC) platforms such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS). The Covergence Collaboration Gateway delivers controlled, secure connectivity between disparate UC platforms including Microsoft (OCS) and IBM Lotus Sametime, allowing users from different organizations – even different companies – to work together as if they were served by the same UC platform, enjoying shared presence information, instant messaging and other features.
Covergence Session Manager is delivered to customers in one of three packaging models. It is available as a hardware appliance, a VMware virtual appliance or as software for the Intel x-86 architecture. To learn more, visit www.covergence.com.