Public Relations

"Solving SIP Firewall/NAT Traversal Problems"

- Asgent and Hitachi IT Team Up to Develop IP Telephony System Security -

June 30th, 2004
Asgent,Inc.
Hitachi Information Technology Co., Ltd.

Hitachi Information Technology Co., Ltd. (President: Masao Kato, HQ: Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, Hitachi IT) and Asgent, Inc. (President & CEO: Takahiro (Shuji) Sugimoto, HQ: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Asgent) have reached a basic agreement to work together to solve security and NAT (*1) traversal problems with firewalls for IP telephony systems that use SIP (*2), as well as to jointly develop and sell MoIP (*3)communication products.

Hitachi IT has developed "SIP:OFFICE", which is an IP communications platform that uses SIP technology, having high affinity with the internet, and simple collaboration with business applications to enable reductions in communication costs, and has been selling it since October 2003.

SIP is a next-generation communications protocol, developed with the objective of easy two-way communications over the Internet. However, the problems of how to safely pass SIP communications through the firewall, and how to resolve multiple addresses when performing NAT traversal become large barriers when corporate users attempt to use the SIP protocol over the Internet. In order to solve these problems Asgent has, in collaboration with its U.S.-based subsidiary company Applico, developed a next-generation MoIP solution, the "Applico MoIP Switch", which it has been selling since September 2003.

The two companies have since conducted rigorous operating tests and development to increase interoperability between both the "Applico MoIP Switch" and "SIP:OFFICE", and are now able to provide a high-security SIP environment for use on the Internet at a reasonable cost. By installing the "Applico MoIP Switch" parallel to existing firewalls/NAT devices and connecting it to "SIP:OFFICE" as in the example below, it is possible to create a safe internal SIP communications environment. To then expand the SIP environment to include people working from home and communicating from hotspots transforms the internal SIP environment into a ubiquitous SIP environment.

Major features of the collaboration

Firewall/NAT traversal in "SIP:OFFICE" achieved; secure communications over intranet and extranet possible.
Changes to security policy (rules) other than SIP made unnecessary.
Implementation of Applico MoIP Switch alongside existing security devices is possible.
Support for VPN (*4) using PPTP (*5), IPSec technology (*6) and TLS (*7), expansion of environment (range of application) is possible.

In the future, both companies will work together to respond to the needs of the IP telephony market, conducting joint marketing activities and product development in order to provide corporate users with the best SIP solution environment available. Moreover, the first year sales target for the "Applico MoIP Switch" and "SIP:OFFICE" combined solution is 2000 sets.

This product will also be adopted for Hitachi's "CommuniMax" solution, which fuses corporate voice communications and information systems, and is situated to play an important role among forthcoming SIP solutions.

The combined solution of the "Applico MoIP Switch" and "SIP:OFFICE" will be demonstrated at Networld+Interop 2004 Tokyo, to be held at Makuhari Messe from June 30th. (Asgent booth: No. 7H15)

*1	SIP: Session Initiation Protocol. Proclaimed as next-generation VoIP protocol, enables establishment of a session (data pipe) on the IP network with little in the way of procedure and easy transfer of multimedia information such as text, audio and video. Standardized as RFC3261 by the IETF.
*2	NAT: Network Address Translation. NAT functions to translate private IP addresses (used in intranet) into global IP addresses and vice versa, enabling an internal machine that has only been assigned a private IP address for use in intranet to access the Internet.
*3	MoIP: Multimedia over Internet Protocol. Enables voice communications as well as videophones, instant messaging, presence information, application sharing and whiteboard functions.
*4	VPN: Virtual Private Network. This allows you to use the public line as though it were a dedicated line, without the expense of implementing an actual dedicated line. Makes use of authentication technology and encryption to provide a protected virtual private line over the Internet.
*5	PPTP: Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol. Encrypted communication protocol devised by Microsoft. Information is encrypted and sent between two computers, enabling information to be exchanged safely over the Internet.
*6	Ipsec: Security Architecture for Internet Protocol. A specification developed for conducting encrypted communication on the Internet. Because sent IP packets are encrypted, there is no need for applications that use upper level protocols like TCP or UDP to be aware that Ipsec is being used.
*7	TLS: Transport Layer Security. This encrypts WWW and FTP data etc. that is used on the Internet, enabling personal information such as credit card numbers or industrial secrets to be encoded and sent/received. Standardized as RFC2246 by the IETF.

* All company names or product names are registered trademarks of their respective companies.

IS 76150 / ISO (JIS Q) 27001

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