Kandy: Celebrating a Year of Digital Disruption

When I joined GENBAND nearly two years ago, one of the things I really wanted to do was tell the world about the innovation that was happening within the company. Working closely with CEO David Walsh and the rest of the leadership team we came up with the idea of leveraging GENBAND’s carrier-class technology to introduce something that no one in the marketplace could match.

The best organizations are finding ways to become digital and that means being seamless between your technology and what a user wants and being data-driven. These organizations are also quickly realizing that the consumer is king and that it’s the consumer who is driving the business, and no longer the  business driving the consumer. We wanted to be sure that we were a part of the Digital Disruption taking place and Kandy was our way of doing that.

We launched Kandy in September of 2014, less than a year after I joined the company. The concept behind the platform is simple.  What if you could give virtually anyone the ability to embed pieces of real-time communications (or Kandy) like IM, Presence, Text, Group Chat and video conferencing directly into their apps by leveraging GENBAND’s world-class communications and security technology?

Clearly when you want to be disruptive you need a superior business model. With Kandy, we think we’ve found it.  We offer reference applications built on Kandy like fring with over 50 million users, Business Call to add a second line to your mobile device instantaneously, micro apps to monetize your community and provide more value, and ecosystem partners with offerings ranging from SMS to transcription services, as well as the ability to white label Kandy and host it in your cloud. Kandy is the future of communications today.

You don’t need to be a developer to take advantage of Kandy. We have these things called Quick Starts. You can simply take our pre-built code snippets and copy and paste them into yours and be up and running in minutes.  You are not investing in large-scale infrastructure, cloud or other expensive resources. You are just consuming ours. We are providing you with Software Development Kits (SDKs), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Quick Starts. You consume and simply pay for what you use. We even have a freemium model – so there is really no excuse not to give Kandy a try.

We think we’ve made our Kandy platform as easy as possible to use. I like to compare Kandy to Netflix, who every day is adding value for their subscribers, whether it’s through their own original content or by providing access to new movies coming online every day. Their model is simple; convenient; quick and more importantly it’s what subscribers want. Kandy, which we are constantly adding new features and functionalities to, allows each customer the ability to simply turn it on, enjoy the platform and build and add their own premium communications services as needed. It also comes at very attractive price points - all with an incredible quality of service and a carrier-grade backbone.

In addition to GENBAND’s carrier-grade backbone, what makes Kandy different from other platforms on the market is the premium services and functionalities that we can offer.  What also differentiates us is the size of the ecosystem partners we are working with, which includes the likes of Tech Mahindra, SAP and Deloitte Digital.  These partners alone provide us potential access to millions of endpoints.

We’ve made amazing progress in just one year: Kandy is now powering more than 15 million users; we have more than 1,500 customer accounts and more than 50 ecosystem partners. Our KandyMobile, which is a state of the art tour bus filled with Kandy demos, has traveled more than 20,000 miles since January, hosting hackathons, attending conferences and ecosystem partner events. 

Every day we’re working with our customers and ecosystem partners to introduce innovative new use cases – many we did not even envision when we launched the platform.

Even though we’re seeing use cases across numerous verticals, a great deal of the recent innovation that is coming to market because of Kandy has been in the healthcare field. Skywriter MD is leveraging Kandy to power its revolutionary technology which provides physicians across the country with real-time, virtual Electronic Health Record (EHR) assistance services with the ability to see and select an available Skywriter (virtual scribe), on-screen and voice collaboration, voice recording and replay, and rich messaging. 

The TelePsych Alliance is using Kandy to power its MindMe platform, one of the first real-time communications enabled suicide prevention apps. Leveraging Kandy’s WebRTC technology MindMe makes it easier for an individual to reach out to a therapist or counselor in real-time and contextually communicate without having to resort to standard telephone counseling or going to a website.

These are examples of Digital Disruption. Companies today really need to start moving towards the digital transformation – because if they do not, they are going to be left behind. In fact, if they are not already moving in that direction, I think it may be too late.  I firmly believe Kandy is one of the best ways to help you get there.