2015 Will Be the Year of Cloud Communications-as-a-Service As Investments Start To Pay Off

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 already off to a running start in this new year, with dozens of new deployments in place, where our partners (who in fact are more like “systems integrators” these days than “resellers”) are aggressively going to market with our cloud as their own (rebranded, reskinned, and integrated with their existing management, billing and operating systems) and adopting innovations like our WebRTC gateway to create their own user experience for the customers they serve, and are attracting away from old school providers.

I’ve been in this industry a very long time, and have interacted with extremely capable and experienced teams, but never have I seen so many creative developers, who are no longer “earth bound” by legacy systems, but are actually taking the best of those legacy systems and building applications on top of them as part of their transformation of their customers’ environments. We announced our Kandy Platform-as-a-Service last year, and were flooded with requests to jump into a sandbox with some awesome APIs, and an SDK for mobile application developers.

It takes courage to take a leap and change – but these solutions create value for customers, who will pay a premium for them, and these solutions, because they are so often “embedded” into workflow – are a lot more sticky than a solution that anybody can resell and support. These applications are allowing businesses to be more competitive – in their industry – specific to what they sell whether healthcare services, concert tickets, consumer electronics, or they provide education through digital classrooms and more.

The “rockstar” channels we support with our technology and software in 2014 continued to “upshift” into systems integration and development and we see this trend accelerating in 2015 as there are more tools than ever to help them do so with a lot less risk.

We’ve been hard at work inventing and implementing breakthrough solutions for real-time communications for businesses, and while there are always challenges (it’s software!) nothing is more exciting than seeing the vision manifest for real. In my next post, I’ll share a few examples of solutions our partners are implementing in the healthcare industry. Not only are these solutions saving money – they are saving lives, which motivates us to work even harder at what we love to do: help people communicate more naturally, more easily, more securely and at scale.