Juniper Networks agreed to acquire Kagoor Networks, a supplier of session border controllers (SBCs), for $67.5 million in cash, plus options and certain other incentives and equity compensation.
Kagoor, which is based in San Mateo, California, with R&D in Herzelia, Israel, has supplied its VoiceFlow SBC products to over 100 carriers worldwide. The company has strategic partnerships with Lucent, Siemens and NEC.
Juniper said the acquisition extends its strategy to bring secure and assured networking to customers worldwide through rich traffic processing. In particular, the session border controllers are being used by network operators to deploy quality VoIP and other rich media services by solving NAT traversal problems and providing interoperability between various protocols. Kagoor's VoiceFlow supports all major VoIP protocols (SIP, H.323, MGCP). Juniper sees SBCs as one of the key building blocks required for infranets. Also, Juniper will leverage the acquisition to establish an Israeli R&D center.
   
|  The Evolution of Session Border Controllers   Sessionborder controllers have matured to play an essential role in delivering secure and seamless VoIP service. Most VoIP has been deployed in "islands", either within enterprises deploying VoIP on a LAN or by a carrier using it for its internal network transport. In both cases, the VoIP traffic terminates at a gateway and is converted to PSTN as it leaves the enterprise or the carrier's network. Session border controllers (SBCs) were designed to connect these islands and create an end-to-end VoIP network |
