At a time when a number of carriers and telecom operators are embracing IP based networks – it is opening up new age opportunities in front of them.
In this scenario, GENBAND is positioning its Unified Communications, Network Virtualization and Embedded Communications portfolio – Kandy to drive profitability and network efficiency for carriers and operators to a new level.
Patrick Joggerst, EVP Global Sales and Marketing, GENBAND speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s current focus and some of the next generation innovations it is bringing to the market today.
What are the key focus areas that GENBAND is working on when it comes to enabling network transformation?
GENBAND has a rich history in real-time communications innovation and our mission has always been to empower our customers and help them succeed in this fast-moving environment.
We view network transformation as a continuum that starts at the network level and goes all the way up the stack. Different customers are at different steps in that process — our job is to support them in protecting their massive infrastructure assets while preparing for the future.
We’ve invested more than $100 million annually over the past 10 years in R&D so that our customers have access to the products and services that will help them win in today’s – and tomorrow’s – marketplace, and we back that up with an award-winning professional services organization that designs and engineers these solutions.
Additionally, the transition to IP and private telco cloud opens a tremendous set of capabilities, which is where our Unified Communications, Network Virtualization and Embedded Communications portfolio, broadly known as Kandy, comes in.
How can operators look forward to better monetization capabilities while minimizing the investment part?
The monetization piece comes in 2 parts: one is cost savings and the other is new service creation and deployment.
Moving to an all-IP environment pays for itself: the PSTN and mobile networks come with unsustainable electricity, water and real estate costs. These resources can be freed up with today’s technologies for extensive savings and better market positioning.
But of course a successful business doesn’t thrive on cost savings alone. You need to move forward, and our offer is built to enable just that. One of the benefits of transitioning to an all-IP and telco cloud environment is gaining new capabilities that allow for the faster creation and delivery of rich, sticky services. These new cloud capabilities can be fully owned by the carrier or outsourced, depending on carrier preferences and regulatory demands.
Carriers can also bolt the Kandy platform onto their networks with NFV and telco cloud services and accelerate new service rollouts with an all-IP, software-defined infrastructure.
While consumers and businesses benefit from these feature-rich voice and video services, carriers can better compete with independent challengers, while protecting their brand and privileged customer relationships.
What are the untapped opportunities in the communications space today that can drive greater profitability for tomorrow?
Our Cloud business leverages our carrier-grade Kandy communications Platform as a Service (cPaaS), which helps operators and enterprises gain new capabilities. Kandy is a unique cloud services offering set comprised of Embedded Communications, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and OTT Over The Top (OTT) solutions built on our extensive real time communications Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio.
Kandy addresses the needs of three specific industry segments via Real Time Communications Platforms, Consumer and Business Solutions.
Carriers can white-label or co-brand our RTC platform solutions, which deliver the richest suite of proven RTC capabilities as well as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Standard Development Toolkits (SDKs) for Embedded Communications.
Kandy, and cloud communications in general, offer different deployment models than what carriers have been used to until now. It’s a much quicker, more flexible approach with a significantly lower upfront investment. Whereas you once had to spend months and years ideating, developing, testing and deploying a product, now these can be turned on in weeks, allowing for real-life validation and ROI in a much shorter time span.
Our consumer solutions include white-labeled, cloud OTT solutions for carriers with rich messaging, voice, and video capabilities. We’ve seen carriers like Nifty in Japan and Max in Bulgaria leverage those capabilities to create OTT solutions that compete with the independent challengers while offering services that are specifically designed for their customer base. A deployment you are likely familiar with is Airtel Talk, which won an award as the “VoIP App with Exceptional Emerging Market Focus” earlier this year.
Finally our business solutions help replace legacy PBX solutions with cloud-based business communications services. They’re designed to enhance leading desktop and business applications such as Skype, Salesforce, Google and others with embedded RTC capabilities that streamline collaboration across multiple devices and deliver better convenience and security. Operators can leverage these solutions for resale to their enterprise customers, as NetFortris does in the US.
Patrick Joggerst, EVP Global Sales and Marketing, GENBAND
We’ve also introduced Kandy Wrappers this year, which help expedite embedded communications deployment for companies of any size. We currently have 8 of these turnkey solutions available, including Concierge, Visual Attendant, Truck Roll, and Two Factor Authentication (2FA), with more to come. We’re seeing great uptake in this area, including with Masergy and XO Communications.
How can the upcoming trends in NFV and SDN help the operators gain more from less?
NFV and SDN help drive efficiencies, improve service agility and fundamentally change the way operators do business. Operators who consolidate network functions onto virtualized cloud-based offerings can reduce proprietary hardware dependencies, contain CAPEX and OPEX and increase service velocity.
With the right solutions in place, carriers gain additional capabilities that physical hardware simply can’t deliver, including elasticity, scalability, geo-distribution and orchestration tenets for cloud and virtualized environments.
Again, we know that each carrier’s situation is unique and the traditional rip and replace often doesn’t work for multiple reasons. That’s why we offer a graceful migration to path to full NFV and hybrid deployment support that enables these carriers to better utilize their physical infrastructure to optimize their costs, freeing them to invest in other areas including innovation and new service deployment.
What are some of the innovative solutions that GENBAND is working on that can enable network transformation for telecoms?
One of the areas we’re most excited about is bringing Kandy and NFV together — by opening up the platform and bringing APIs and turnkey apps to the network, our customers will achieve significant cost and deployment efficiencies. This is still in the early stages but it’s very much at the forefront of the industry. We are in the process of launching a Proof of Concept trial with a large carrier so stay tuned!
There’s a lot of movement in the industry right now and it’s an exciting time for us to work with our global customers. We’re looking forward to a lot of continued innovation as these carriers really leverage their infrastructure for today’s environment.
