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.

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.

The mobile market place is undergoing major shifts and mobile carriers are facing major challenges in staying competitive in delivering services, and scaling their networks efficiently. Voice and SMS are commoditized, and the revenues are shifting from voice to data while the combined revenue of voice and data is not able to keep pace with the rising cost of delivering mobile data. VoLTE and RCS investments, while visionary, are not making a positive impact on top and bottom lines fast enough.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom-line. As partners look at managing their business to increase profitability and making decision on which line-cards to carry, which services to offer, workforce management and which growth areas to drive to solidify the monthly recurring revenue (MRC) streams. However, it’s important as you look at your business to also understand what vendor partner ecosystem are you in.

In just a few short years, the communications industry has been turned on its head. While traditional telecom operators often defined the manner in which subscribers would communicate – voice or SMS, for the most part – end users are now much more influential in calling the shots.

In the post-Supercomm world, tradeshows in North America have become focused on specific technology areas, rather than diffused across multiple segments of the industry. The WebRTC Conference & Expo in Atlanta, conducted at the end of June, was no exception. It’s hard to think of a hotter topic careening through the corridors of the communications industry these days than the rise of browser-based unified-communications.

Despite the widespread use in the past decade of IP-based communications systems known as IP PBXs, the TDM pipes that connect those enterprise platforms to the public network have only slowly been replaced by IP connections. For multiple reasons, the most prominent being the desire of some network operators to preserve a fairly hefty cash cow of TDM T1s, E1s and PRIs, this IP-based connectivity service – commonly referred to as SIP Trunking – is only now hitting its groove.

The excitement surrounding WebRTC continues to grow unabated. Innovation abounds and every day I am bombarded on the Twittersphere (in addition to multiple LinkedIn groups, RSS blog feeds and frequent webinars) with another product announcement or a new and interesting demonstration of the technology.   I am encouraged that so many share our opinion that WebRTC is a truly disruptive force.

After more than a decade of deployment history, the session border controller (SBC) is now widely recognized as an essential component in the ongoing transition to an all-IP network. Stationed at the intersections of IP networks, SBCs perform a myriad of tasks to ensure that information carried in SIP sessions -- whether voice, video, presence or IM -- completes its end-to-end journey in a secure and timely fashion.