Ribbon Communications: What a Difference a Year Makes

On this day, one year ago, the merger of Sonus and GENBAND was completed, and Ribbon Communications was born. The transaction was a “merger of equals” and has turned out to be a very positive and beneficial union, not only for world-class global customer base but also for our employees, our ecosystem partners and the industry as a whole.

Over the previous 12 months, Ribbon has demonstrated itself to be a leader, a continued market innovator, an industry consolidator and a great corporate citizen. As we continue to move forward into 2019, we thought we would share a look back at the some of the major accomplishments made possible by our talented team of employees along with our ecosystem and go-to-market partners.

• In December 2017 we announced Fritz Hobbs as our new President and Chief Executive Officer. Fritz has a long accomplished record of leading transformation across many industries and has already been instrumental in accelerating the realization of the vision of Ribbon. Under Fritz’s leadership, we have continued to innovate, expand our offerings and successfully completed the strategic acquisition of Edgewater Networks.
• In January of this year, Verizon Communications deployed our Session Border Controller Software edition (SBC SWe) to offer as a service (SBCaaS) through Verizon’s Virtual Network Services (VNS). The SBCaaS offering helps Verizon enterprise customers dynamically respond to seasonal demands in a truly elastic operating expense model, helping them better manage their costs, adjust to changing business needs, and reduce their reliance on dedicated network hardware and potential points of network failure.
• A great example of the innovation we are bringing to market includes a major announcement we made in February at one of the largest mobile events in the industry, Mobile World Congress. We unveiled our new Ribbon Protect security and analytics platform. Ribbon Protect, which is a big data behavioral analytics platform, is designed to eliminate blind spots and provide advanced fraud management protection while safeguarding communications service providers’ (CSPs’) and enterprises’ real-time communications networks and applications from security attacks while delivering unparalleled visibility into network operations. Softbank, a leading service provider in Japan, has already deployed Ribbon Protect to enhance its visibility into its growing network.
• During the first quarter a major global retailer migrated their communications infrastructure across hundreds of locations to Ribbon’s Kandy cloud communications platform. The company selected Ribbon because of its extensive experience in providing reliable cloud-based, multi-site business communications services.
• In March, during one of the most important enterprise events in the industry, we announced that Ribbon was one of only two Session Border Controller vendors that were officially certified to deliver integrated voice services to the Microsoft Teams collaboration environment. Teams is the hub for teamwork in Microsoft Office 365 that allows users to easily chat, share files, data and conduct meetings online to improve productivity. Now powered by our market-leading Session Border Controller technology, customers around the world can adopt Teams as their modern workspace collaboration tool, while seamlessly integrating advanced voice services.
• In May, The City of Los Angeles, which includes more than 40 departments and 50,000-plus employees, signed an agreement to upgrade its Unified Communications (UC) capabilities and voicemail system with Ribbon's Kandy Business Solutions (KBS), replacing its legacy PBX and key systems with state-of-the-art, cloud-based UCaaS capabilities.

We held our first Perspectives Customer and Partner Summit as Ribbon Communications in Los Angeles in June and the response from attendees, which included more than 40 industry press and analysts, was overwhelmingly positive. It was the perfect opportunity to showcase the new Ribbon brand and our expanded offerings to our global customer and ecosystem partner base. The event included some great keynotes and panels from some of our leading customers and partners from all over the world.

• Enterprise and government verticals are a key part of Ribbon’s strategic focus moving forward and we continue to make great progress on this front, not only with our increasing portfolio of Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC)-certified solutions, but also with actual customer deployments. In June we announced that Ribbon, along with key partners Verizon, Blackbox and Visioneering had completed one of the largest Voice Over IP (VoIP) deployments in the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) history, leveraging Ribbon’s JITC-certified Application Server. The deployment allows the DoD to significantly upgrade its communications capabilities with the latest in secure real-time unified communications (UC) technology, including the ability to seamlessly integrate voice, video, instant messaging, presence and conferencing into the end-user experience.
•  In August we announced the completion of the previously mentioned Edgewater Networks acquisition. Edgewater Networks was a market leader in Network Edge Orchestration for the small and medium enterprise (SME) and Unified Communications (UC) market. Ribbon’s acquisition of Edgewater Networks allows us to create a best-in-breed, complete platform that extends our leadership position in the Session Border Controller (SBC), cloud UC, security, analytics and rapidly growing SD-WAN markets.
• Earlier this month Ribbon was recognized as the Business Intelligence Group’s (BIG) Enterprise Company of the Year. BIG Awards for Business uses a proprietary and unique scoring system to selectively measure performance across multiple business domains and rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers. We think this is a great validation of the outstanding work that our team is doing.
• We continue to gain traction in our efforts to help our CSP customers fend off the challenges of non-traditional players like Twilio by leveraging our Kandy platform. Just last week we announced that Hong Kong Broadband Networks Limited (HKBN) has leveraged Kandy Link to build and deploy Global Talk, a custom Over The Top (OTT) application within their Global Phone service that enables callers to enjoy high-speed global data connectivity across more than 60 regions worldwide without incurring roaming charges. Earlier this week we announced that our Kandy platform is the foundation for Optus Loop Live, a mobile-oriented solution that enables Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) to quickly and efficiently conduct business telephony on their mobile phones.

Last Friday, October 26^th, Ribbon employees around the world spent the day volunteering at non-profits and charitable organizations around the world during our first annual Ribbon Day Global Day of Service. We wanted to mark the first anniversary of the historic GENBAND-Sonus merger by encouraging our employees to spend what is typically a workday giving back to the communities in which they live and work. More than 50 organizations from around the world from the Boys & Girls Club, to Special Olympics, to the House with No Steps benefited from the kindness and generosity of our great team at Ribbon and I could not be prouder.

These are just a few of the many highlights that have occurred over the past year. All of this has happened even as the industries we participate in have been undergoing dramatic and exciting changes. The validation we’ve experienced, as evidenced by the customers we are serving, the response to strategic acquisitions, and the recognition from industry leaders has inspired our plans for the next year and beyond as Ribbon Communications.

We are as proud of our commitment to our customers and communities as we are of our accomplishments and are more energized than ever around our unified vision for making connected life better, safer and more prosperous for all. As a truly global company, operating in more than 25 countries, we understand our obligation to serve, not only as a quality business enterprise, but as good, responsible corporate citizens who value integrity, ethics and generosity in an often challenging but ever resilient world.