By Dan O'Shea

Reef Point Systems, a vendor of security solutions focused on fixed-mobile converged networks, announced that it has signed an OEM agreement with Alcatel, under which the companies will integrate Reef Point's Multiservice Security Gateway into Alcatel's Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) solutions.

While UMA has begun to see commercial adoption and increasing carrier commitment, and IMS hype has continued unabated, carriers and theur customers may have some concern about how to ensure security as users are roaming across disparate network types. "This partnership between Alcatel and Reef Point brings fixed-mobile convergence closer to market reality. While converged networks are a major opportunity for wireless operators, they are also bound to security issues that must be addressed," said Monica Paolini, founder and president of Senza Fili Consulting, in a statement.

Many security functions can be provided through session border controllers (SBC), but to date Reef Point has taken a different approach than the SBC crowd, designing a security gateway supporting up to 500,000 simultaneous connections, while offering threat defenses that include stateful firewalls with Denial of Service attack prevention, intrusion detection services, custom firewall filtering, dynamic virtual routing with Network Address Translation, and session limiting to protect against external threats.