Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller Reviews

Pros

Twice now, one SBC in our HA pair has failed and both times the failover happened immediately without disrupting active sessions. That kind of reliability has been a big plus. Oracle's EOM Tool also gives us a single dashboard to view all SBC activity in one place which makes troubleshooting much more practical since we can quickly pull historical SIP ladders and PCAPs. On top of that oracle's training rounds out the product nicely and supports the overall experience well.

Cons

Getting a new team member fully comfortable with SBC configuration and administration takes quite a bit of time because there's a lot of nuance in the way calls move through the system. List uploads also have to be done in XML which is less convenient than using a more user friendly format like CSV. Another limitation is that virtual appliances offer less transcoding capacity compared with the physical hardware.

Pros

From deployment to day to day use, this product has been extremely dependable. The web interface is very well designed and its session troubleshooting is better than what I've seen from other vendors. The CLI is also excellent, with everything organized into separate sections so each part can be configured independently. Support has been very responsive as well and across 8 years of implementing these products, I've only run into one actual issue with them. Most of the time, any problems came from something outside the product. Once configured and moved into production, they just keep running and rarely need attention.

Cons

One thing I've noticed is that the session troubleshooting in the web interface used to be much faster and more responsive before version 8.0.0. Starting with version 8.0.0, after it was customized, that part became a bit laggy.