Back in early nineties, straight out of college, I began working on Wall Street building trading floor technology and trying to keep up with the growth of the public markets and innovation in platforms. In my early twenties, I was charged with engineering and evolving sophisticated trader voice applications, connecting thousands of participants – buyers, sellers, brokers, banks and, of course, exchanges.

2015 was incredible, but I am super excited to kick off a new year on so many great notes. My team and I have already been hard at work planning for a busy 2016 for GENBAND.

Today GENBAND announced with SAP solutions for "getting work done" which have been developed by SAP, and now enhanced with GENBAND's Kandy platform-as-a-service real-time communications features. 

I can’t believe we are already approaching the month of August.  The first seven months of 2015 sure went by quickly, but have been filled with a ton of great activities and milestones for GENBAND, Kandy and the fring Alliance. 

I can’t believe it has already been two years since I took over as CEO of GENBAND.

A lot has happened in the past 24 months and while I always try to look forward and ensure that we as a company are well positioned for the future, in this case I think it is worth a retrospective look back to acknowledge some of the milestones that my team has been instrumental in helping us achieve during this period.

Over the past half-decade we’ve finally started to make some real progress simplifying deployment of Unified Communications (UC) and Collaboration.  First virtualization and now Cloud technologies have abstracted away much of the complexity of UC server deployments.  In the case of the Cloud, the burden has been shifted to third parties that focus on these tools so every organization is not forced to employ UC experts.

2014 was a remarkable year at GENBAND, as we continued to bring better ways of working and communicating to our growing channel partner network, who in turn leveraged our cloud (NUViA) and platform (Kandy) as well as our SIP Trunking and Application Server offerings to improve their offerings – and bottom line profits.

Have we moved on from the idea of “Unified Communications” to “Optimized Real-Time Communications?” There’s a lot of chatter going on about the death of “UC” and the rise of “RTC” for businesses, and the notion that the desktop phone and PBX as we knew them are being systematically, if slowly, decommissioned in favor of the more sophisticated mobile devices now available. But it’s not just the devices, it’s the applications including security applications, and the movement toward embedding RTC into everyday workflow and platforms, including CRM.

Enterprise communications continues to be one of the most important and mission-critical areas in most organizations today.  Providing global workforces with the latest in communications technologies is at the top of the priority list for most CIOs and IT leaders. 

We are experiencing a tremendous response to one of our most unique offerings, which makes it possible for our partners to serve customers with Nortel investments by keeping their networks – and phones – in place by providing a centralized session management platform connecting multiple branch offices.