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Looking Back on an Action-Packed Six Months!
June 20th, 2016
Bita Milanian, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, GENBAND
I cannot believe that we are already nearly halfway through the year. The first half of 2016 has been an amazing ride for me and my team, to whom I have to give a major shout-out and without whose commitment to excellence our company could not do what we do so successfully. Not only has my team produced a number of awesome events including Mobile World Congress, Enterprise Connect and our very own Perspectives16, but they have also been instrumental in spreading the word about how GENBAND and Kandy are making great strides in our strategic initiatives of helping our customers “Protect What They Have (GENBAND Network Transformation) and Invest in the Future (Kandy Communications Platform).”
Mobile World Congress continues to be one of the most important industry events for us and this year we had another action-packed four days in the beautiful city of Barcelona with a ton of fruitful customer and partner meetings as well as back-to-back-to-back media and analysts briefings with outlets from all over the world. GENBAND’s CEO, David Walsh, did a great job of highlighting our 2016 initiatives in this video interview with Light Reading. For the second consecutive year we celebrated our presence at Mobile World Congress with a high-energy fring Alliance party that did not disappoint.
Enterprise Connect is another key conference for us and at this year’s show we issued strategic announcements with the likes of XO Communications and Polycom about the excellent progress we are making on the enterprise and government fronts. We were also able to generate a great deal of pre-conference buzz with our second Twitter Chat of the year, which featured our Subject Matter Experts discussing our enterprise capabilities and the many trends they are seeing that are helping to shape enterprise communications. Just as with Mobile World Congress we had several customer and partner meetings and media and analysts briefings during which we highlighted our collaboration activities with IBM.
But my favorite event of the year by far has been Perspectives16, our annual customer & partner summit. It is a unique opportunity for us to bring our customers and partners from all over the world to one central location to hear from thought and business leaders discussing the issues and trends that are shaping the communications industry. This was the fourth year for Perspectives and I cannot tell you how many compliments I received from attendees on the content, production, entertainment and overall quality of the show. It was so gratifying to hear that all of the hard work that my team has put in to making Perspectives one of the best events in the industry paid off so immensely.
In addition to great presentations from global brands such as IBM, Verizon and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dr. Margaret Heffernan, CEO, Author and Columnist, delivered a brilliant keynote on the importance of Collaboration. I was lucky enough to see Dr. Heffernan speak at a TEDWomen conference a year earlier and felt that she would be a perfect fit for Perspectives16. Judging from the attendees’ feedback I was right.
Our CEO, David Walsh also introduced the concept of “The Exchange of Everything” (EoE), highlighting a completely disruptive realm at the intersection of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Real-Time Communications (RTC). The concept of EoE is simple - in an increasingly competitive digital economy those who can leverage the value of IoT by embedding easy-to-use real-time communications capabilities into apps and business processes to be more agile and responsive to human needs will be most successful. Check out David’s keynote for more on the Exchange of Everything. 
I can’t wait until next year’s show, which we are already in the process of planning. We will be moving Perspectives from Orlando to my home town of Los Angeles and it promises to be the best show yet.
The progress that we are making at GENBAND is tremendous. In the first half of 2016 alone we have issued strategic announcements with tier-one technology brands such as SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, XO Communications, CenturyLink, Polycom, Telecom Italia Sparkle and Oi (Brazil). And there are more to come!
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We are also making excellent progress on our Kandy platform. I recently attended the grand opening of our new Kandy Cloud Center of Excellence (COE) in Ottawa, Canada - also known as the Silicon Valley of the North – so it’s ideal for Kandy. The opening of the new Kandy Center of Excellence was attended by the Mayor of Ottawa, Investment Ottawa and other local dignitaries. The Kandy COE and the hiring of new employees to support our cloud efforts is a direct result of the growth and traction that we are seeing in the Communications Platform as a Service market.
As you can see we have already packed a full year’s worth of activities into six months and I couldn’t be happier or prouder to be part of something that is really special. Here’s to a great second half of 2016!
