The Santa Clara, California-based vendor has actually been talking about its Stoke Session Exchange since last year, and indeed it provided a v1.0 of the platform to a major Japanese network operator in 2006.

What is launched today, however, is a fully featured version of the device, and the first to go on GA, said Keith Higgins, Stoke’s VP of marketing.

The privately held company has also evolved the way it talks about the SSX since last year, describing it now as a multi-access gateway not only for FMC, but also subscriber management that is user- rather than device-based, as the Stoke exec put it.

Other companies are re-purposing time-division switching matrix (TDSM) or session border control (SBC) technology for this role, but we’re the first purpose-built device, Higgins claimed.

He added that there has been a shift in emphasis in the FMC community over last year, away fro targeting seamless handover between radio access modes and towards the control of management of services.

There area lot of MVNOs who need to keep a session on the lower-cost connection and so are going for a ‘best-connected’ service without seamless handover, he said.

This explains the features Stoke is emphasizing in launching the SSX. Whereas last year it was talking up the WLAN internetworking capability (a.k.a. IWLAN), enabling 3GPP-based access control and charging on a WLAN, as well as access to bandwidth-hungry 3G services at lower cost from WLAN.

Now the emphasis is on things like multi-access intelligent session management, by which it means management of diverse sessions and tunnel types to ensure that services can be deployed consistently, regardless of location or device.

Higgins said the current product is carrier-focussed though we could make a pizza-box device for mobile integration with a PBX for big enterprises. In terms of competition, he said Stoke sees Cisco in RFPs for access-independent gateways, as well as Starent, though they latter is only in CDMA networks. We’re different because we operate in the session layer, he went on.

As for the funding round, Stoke said it brings the total raised so far to $50m, with VCs taking part including Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers.