Trends & Predictions 2018 | TelecomDrive.com
Combining strengthens from the merger of GENBAND and Sonus – Ribbon Communications is now looking at the year 2018 with a lot of positivity and renewed vigor.
Bringing in a lot of innovation with its Real-Time Communications software solutions – Ribbon will be looking towards enhancing the unified communications experience for enterprises in key verticals such as Public Sector/Government, Finance, Healthcare and Education.
Patrick Joggerst, CMO & Executive Vice President, Business Development, Ribbon Communications interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about Ribbon’s reflection on year 2017 and how the company is looking ahead on the year 2018.
How has been the year for Ribbon? It would be great if you can share some of the big customer wins that you had as an organization.
2017 was a transformational year for Ribbon, as we brought together two leaders in the real time communications space to create a single entity with unmatched capabilities in providing network interconnection, SIP Trunking and security solutions, all now virtualized as part of transformation projects in carrier, service provider and enterprise networks.
As two separate companies, we announced multiple wins in 2017 including, Five9, Korea Telecom, du, Los Angeles Public Library, Algar Telecom, and others. We’re excited to start 2018 strong with customer announcements around Cloud, Unified Communications, NFV and Network Transformation.
Patrick Joggerst - Ribbon Communications
How do you look at the year 2018? What are the key priorities that are going to drive the organization ahead?
We’ve seen major leaps forward on the applications layer in 2017, including the evolution and adoption of business communications solutions such as Unified Communications as a Service, Cloud Communications as a Service and embedded communications.
We also saw consumer “over-the-top” (OTT) applications including Deutsche Telekom’s immmr, which enables service providers to roll out their own branded mobile, multimedia messaging apps.
In 2018, we’ll continue to move forward with real time communications software solutions, including our innovative Kandy Wrappers, which are revenue-ready and designed for rapid service creation. Customers who white-label these pre-packaged solutions can easily bring to market the next-gen productivity, contact center, and industry vertical messaging and collaboration solutions that run brilliantly on virtualized network infrastructures and cloud platforms.
Another major focus area for us in the coming year will be on enhancing the unified communications experience for enterprises in key verticals such as Public Sector/Government, Finance, Healthcare and Education. Enterprise end-users benefit from secure embedded and contextual communications experiences, enhancing the user experience and improving productivity.
Ribbon enables enterprises to seamlessly secure and bridge their investments in existing communications environments from the likes of Microsoft, Cisco and others with a comprehensive secure, web and mobile-based approach and experience seamless mash-ups.
We will also continue contributing to the movement to simplify the delivery and management of tightly integrated and differentiated end-to-end NFV solutions.
What are some of the big industry trends that are going to be important for Ribbon in year 2018?
The umbrella trend is open, interoperable, and easy to accelerate real-time communications software, which is right in our sweet spot. The PSTN is still pervasive around the globe, making transcoding a strategic imperative for the industry and our company. The ability to deliver rich video sessions, for example, at high quality but cost efficiently is becoming increasingly important and we’ll continue to deliver the solutions that make that a possibility.
Security, of course, is key within the new context of open, interoperable, cloud-native networking. We’re working with our technology ecosystem partners and customers to address the growing “threat surface” as the channels of communications continue to grow and as voice and messaging applications are now seen by attackers as new ways into the network.
Enterprises in particular store and manage massive amounts of information about their business and customers, and we’re helping them build security not only at the edge of the network but within the network, which is now possible in a software-designed and software-managed world.
The bad news is with more interoperability, more APIs, the massive growth of the Internet of Things creating more end-points, and more sharing of infrastructure in general, sophisticated criminals are figuring out new ways to penetrate and cause havoc.
It takes a village and we continue to work diligently with the ecosystem to help ensure that global networks are reliable and secure as a key part of successful next-gen transformations.
What innovations can we expect from Ribbon in the year 2018?
Digital transformation has changed the landscape for service providers. The extraordinary growth of social media, messaging channels, and other applications replacing traditional voice and SMS functionality has forced service providers to develop and refresh new revenue streams.
Ribbon is committed to empowering and enabling our customers with business enablers including the apps users prefer, delivered as fully functional, customizable white-label services. We’ve led the way in interconnecting networks and applications, and will continue to serve as disruptors in this space, with an even bigger and more powerful “hyper-connected world” vision.
This means moving to virtualized infrastructure and offering services and solutions that recognize mobile as the lifeblood of real time communications, while delivering and embracing innovations across the ecosystem.
We created Ribbon to deliver on our mission: ensuring our customers have access to and leverage the benefits of next-generation networks and applications to deliver better services, deepen their customer relationships, and create value.
