When I joined GENBAND in early 2015 I had firsthand knowledge of the innovation that was taking place at the company and that’s one of the things that made the organization so attractive to me. I’ve known David Walsh, our CEO, for many years and I know that he is fully committed to anticipating our customers’ needs and delivering the solutions and services that help them compete and maintain their dominant position in the communications industry. Staking out leadership positions across this dynamic landscape is part of our DNA.

A few years ago when everyone was still debating the merits of WebRTC and whether or not it would ever be a viable technology, GENBAND led the charge in highlighting the benefits of WebRTC.  We were one of the first to demonstrate how the communications industry and others could leverage these capabilities to enhance the customer engagement experience. Following the launch of our WebRTC solution and GENBAND positioning itself as a thought leader on the topic of Real-Time Communications, the market soon followed and today WebRTC is firmly entrenched as an integral part of many communications companies’ offerings and solution sets.

Similarly, when most in the industry thought Over-the-Top was a bad word and OTT solutions were public enemy number one with communications service providers, GENBAND took a different strategic view.  We believe that a carrier supported OTT offering offers our customers a great weapon to fight back against competitors like Skype, Viber and WhatsApp, who were trying to siphon off their customers by riding on the backs of their networks for free. GENBAND acquired fring, an OTT pioneer, and quickly demonstrated to the marketplace how by leveraging fring’s innovative technology we could become, as David Walsh likes to refer to it, “the OTT fighters” to help our customers maintain and grow their customer bases with free to freemium offerings that would keep customers on their networks and allow them to successfully compete against independent OTT providers.

Shortly following our acquisition of fring, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion, dramatically reinforcing the value of the OTT market. We have gained traction with our OTT service provider customers, and are working closely with them to develop new and creative revenue streams that surround their offers. 

Yet another example of how GENBAND was ahead of the marketplace was when we decided to use our world-class core communications, presence, security and real-time technologies as the backbone to build our new Kandy communications Platform-as-a-Service (cPaaS). Since introducing Kandy and opening up our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that service providers, enterprises, systems integrators, software vendors and developers could leverage Kandy to produce disruptive real-time communications applications and services to dramatically improve workflows with embedded Real-Time Communications, we have been amazed at how fast the platform has grown.

In the first year alone Kandy was powering more than 15 million users and had more than 1,500 customer accounts. Since we launched Kandy in the fall of 2014 our strategy of anticipating customer needs and where the market is going has once again been proven through highly successful IPOs of companies in the platform market and the high profile acquisitions of platform providers (Nexmo, Tropo, etc.).

Earlier this year we introduced Kandy Wrappers, which enable our customers to digitize business processes with turnkey solutions, avoiding the need for customized development and providing the ability to rapidly create and introduce new services. These Kandy Wrappers are easily deployed, fully functional offerings that do everything from creating a dynamic online shopping experience to providing secure, two factor authentication protecting end-customers’ privacy.

And there’s more to come! With Network Transformation and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) transforming the industry we have a number of new initiatives planned for later this year and into next that we’re confident will help cement our leadership position in this space and help our customers reap the benefits of an all-IP virtualized, environment through costs and power savings, greater flexibility and the ability to deploy richer services faster and more easily.

One of the things that we pride ourselves on at GENBAND is having a clear vision for the future, anticipating market needs and providing our customers with the solutions and services that will not only help them contend but more importantly succeed in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. Time and time again we have proven that we can correctly anticipate the market needs of our customers and I firmly believe that’s why so many of our existing customers continue to put their trust in GENBAND.

Stay tuned…. as I mentioned earlier - there is a lot more to come.

Patrick