Edgewater Networks announced today that it's raised $5 million to help carriers deliver services such as security to small and medium-sized businesses.

The funding came from Eastward Capital Partners and brings Edgewater's total debt and equity funding to $36 million.

Founded in 2002, Edgewater is best known for Edgemarc, a session border controller (SBCs) for smaller businesses. It connects a business to the voice service, which is living in the cloud, and it serves as a demarcation point for the carrier. Edgewater's customer is the service provider that's offering the voice service and managing the SBC at the customer premises.

Now it wants to use that equipment for an NFV-related project called Apollo. Edgewater wants to use Edgemarc for delivering other carrier-hosted services. In particular, it could house virtual security appliances.

From the service providers' point of view, this takes advantage of the CPU cycles already sitting at the customer premises, inside Edgemarc. And it lets them virtually install a service there without a truck roll.

The idea is best applied for relatively simple services such as certain firewalls. Edgemarc has limited CPU power, so more compute-hungry services such as virus protection would be better hosted in the cloud, Edgewater says.

The company thinks security would be a good fit for Apollo because Edgemarc is already looking at packets coming through that enterprise demarcation point. It's gathering snapshots of traffic conditions and collecting information about things like call quality, delivering all that data to Edgeview, a management and monitoring software package. Apollo would apply that same monitoring capability to a task such as security. Edgewater is enlisting security partners to help with the details, CEO David Norman says.

Apollo starts alpha testing this quarter and should be ready for delivery shortly afterward, Edgewater says.