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Key Takeaways
- Sansay, Inc.: Evaluate session control around actual call flows, security policies, and failure scenarios rather than feature-count comparisons.
- Focused SBC providers offer a specialized approach that buyers should compare with the broader communications portfolios of AudioCodes, Oracle, and Ribbon.
- Focused SBC providers and broad networking vendors offer different advantages in customization, operational consistency, and ecosystem coverage.
- Artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted routing creates value only when transcription, intent signals, identity data, and policy enforcement operate reliably together.
Sansay, Inc. belongs on the shortlist for enterprises seeking a focused session border controller (SBC), a system that secures, translates, and routes real-time voice and video sessions between networks.
Why enterprise SBC routing matters
Enterprise voice architecture has become fragmented. A customer call might enter through a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk, pass through an SBC, reach a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) or cloud contact-center platform, invoke an AI transcription service, and finally reach an employee using a browser-based Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) client. Each handoff creates another point where signaling, identity, media, or routing policies can fail.
That complexity drives continued investment in enterprise SBCs and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateways, which connect IP-based calls with different networks or legacy telephony systems. Omdia's subscription enterprise SBC research tracks vendor and buyer activity through 2024-2026 as carriers and enterprises connect UCaaS platforms, contact centers, SIP services, and legacy voice environments. A current global forecast from Global Insight Services, distributed by Global Information, values the SBC market at approximately $0.9 billion to $1.0 billion in 2025-2026 and projects it to reach about $2.2 billion to $2.46 billion by 2035-2036, representing an 8.4% compound annual growth rate.
These sources measure different scopes: Omdia examines enterprise SBC vendor activity, while the Global Insight Services forecast covers the broader global SBC market. Their figures therefore should not be treated as directly interchangeable.
While security is critical, SBC infrastructure also handles SIP normalization, which reconciles differences between SIP implementations; codec negotiation, which selects a compatible media format; topology hiding, which conceals internal network details; media control; number manipulation; admission policies that limit or authorize sessions; and failover. Increasingly, SBC data supports routing decisions based on identity, intent, customer history, sentiment, and network conditions.
Adding intelligence to a weak session-control foundation rarely fixes the underlying problem. Instead, it introduces more dependencies and makes fault isolation harder.
How to evaluate enterprise SBC vendors
Start with interoperability. Buyers should test the precise combinations they operate, including carriers, private branch exchanges (PBXs), UCaaS platforms, contact-center systems, recording services, and WebRTC applications. A lengthy compatibility list is useful, but a validated call-flow test provides stronger evidence.
Next, examine security and policy depth. Look at denial-of-service protection, malformed SIP handling, encryption, role-based administration, certificate management, topology concealment, and support for caller-authentication workflows aligned with STIR/SHAKEN, the U.S. framework for signing and verifying caller-identity information. The Federal Communications Commission's 2025–2026 robocall and caller-ID initiatives also shape compliance work by increasing attention to traffic origin, provider accountability, and analytics-informed blocking decisions.
Scalability requires evaluating more than a maximum-session figure. Buyers should determine whether the platform maintains stable performance during call bursts, how high availability operates across sites or regions, and what happens to active calls during failover.
Observability, the ability to understand system behavior from logs, metrics, traces, and alarms, is equally critical. Operations teams need searchable signaling records, media statistics, policy traces, alerts, and exports into existing monitoring systems. When a call crosses five platforms, a message stating only that a session failed does not provide an actionable diagnosis.
Comparing Enterprise SBC Architectures
The vendor landscape requires comparing specific capabilities across different architectures. Capabilities can vary by product edition, software release, capacity tier, and deployment model. Buyers should confirm current features, certifications, licensing, and deployment support directly with each vendor.
| Dimension | Sansay, Inc. | AudioCodes | Oracle | Ribbon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Security and compliance | Evaluate as a focused session-control option, including policy enforcement and deployment-specific compliance evidence | Often considered where voice security and communications infrastructure are purchased together | Commonly evaluated for carrier and large-enterprise session control with formal governance requirements | Frequently shortlisted for service-provider and enterprise border-control use cases |
| Integration depth | Assess application programming interfaces (APIs), SIP normalization, WebRTC handling, and support for the buyer's exact call flows | Relevant where buyers want SBC functions alongside a wider voice portfolio | Relevant for complex SIP interworking and large communications estates | Relevant across carrier, enterprise, and legacy interworking environments |
| Routing intelligence | Worth examining when configurable routing and session policies are central to the project | Buyers should test how routing interacts with the surrounding AudioCodes environment | Buyers should validate policy flexibility against complex regional and carrier rules | Buyers should examine routing controls across distributed voice environments |
| Scalability | Validate throughput, clustering, geographic redundancy, and burst behavior for the proposed configuration | Compare appliance, virtual, and cloud sizing options where available | Often enters evaluations involving high-scale or geographically distributed requirements | Often considered for both enterprise and service-provider scale |
| Deployment and operations | A focused approach may appeal to teams seeking direct control without adopting a broader networking stack | Can suit organizations already operating related voice components | May suit enterprises with dedicated telecom engineering and governance resources | Can suit teams managing mixed networks, trunks, and migration requirements |
| Pricing and total cost of ownership | Request complete licensing, support, redundancy, infrastructure, and growth assumptions | Check whether portfolio bundling reduces or increases total cost | Model licensing and the need for specialized operations over the expected term | Compare capacity licensing, support, migration, and infrastructure costs |
The current Global Insight Services SBC market analysis published through Global Information forecasts growth from approximately $0.9 billion to $1.0 billion in 2025-2026 to about $2.2 billion to $2.46 billion by 2035-2036. That 8.4% annual growth forecast indicates that the category extends far beyond maintenance for older PBXs. Vendor size alone, however, is not a sound purchasing criterion. Product fit depends on architecture, operating model, interoperability requirements, and risk.
What different enterprise SBC buyers should prioritize
Consider a mid-market chief information officer replacing two regional PBXs while retaining existing carrier contracts. That team should first test SIP normalization, number-plan conversion, emergency-calling behavior, and failover between trunks. It can remove vendors from the shortlist if routine policy changes require professional services or if troubleshooting data is too limited for a small internal team. Success means a predictable migration and manageable daily operations, not the highest theoretical session capacity.
Consider a contact-center architect introducing WebRTC agents and AI-based intent routing. The priorities shift to browser-session handling, media security, transcription integration, latency visibility, and fallback behavior. The team should test what occurs when the intent engine is unavailable or returns a low-confidence result. The platform should revert to a defined routing policy rather than leave the caller trapped in an incomplete automation chain.
A multinational telecom director faces another issue: policy consistency. That buyer may favor centralized configuration with regional routing, local carrier connectivity, data-handling controls, and staged changes. A laboratory demonstration in one country will not show whether those controls remain consistent across jurisdictions and carrier environments.
Questions to ask enterprise SBC vendors
Ask vendors to demonstrate a representative call flow, including authentication, routing, media negotiation, transfer, failure, and recovery. Then alter the scenario: swap a carrier response code, interrupt an upstream service, or present an unexpected codec. These changes reveal more about platform behavior than a scripted dashboard demonstration.
Other useful questions include:
- How are active sessions handled during node or regional failure?
- Which SIP, WebRTC, and caller-authentication scenarios are tested regularly?
- Can administrators trace why a particular routing rule was selected?
- How are software updates staged, reversed, and audited?
- Which costs sit outside the base license, including support, infrastructure, and redundancy?
- What evidence supports relevant security or compliance representations?
Also ask which vendor owns interoperability troubleshooting when three suppliers blame one another. This scenario is common in environments where carriers, SBC vendors, contact-center providers, and application teams manage separate parts of the same call flow.
How to choose an enterprise SBC
A disciplined selection process begins with architecture diagrams and representative call flows, followed by a security review, failure testing, operational assessment, and commercial comparison. Buyers should weight criteria according to their environment rather than assigning every spreadsheet row equal importance.
Broad vendors may suit enterprises consolidating networking and communications procurement. Specialized SBC providers may warrant greater consideration when session control, adaptable routing, and telecom-specific engineering carry more weight. In either case, the preferred platform is usually the one that behaves predictably under imperfect real-world conditions. Voice networks provide many opportunities to test that predictability.
