Last year at this time, we brought together more than 600 customers, partners and industry leaders at what was GENBAND's fourth annual global gathering, which I can confidently say is one of the most educational, motivational, inspirational and intimate events our industry offers.

This year, following the successful post-merger integration of GENBAND and Sonus, we entered 2018 as a single global technology company named Ribbon Communications, and have subsequently attracted exciting new customers and partners, while continuing to serve hundreds of Communications Service Providers across the planet.

What’s in a Name?

The Ribbon name reflects our team's mission to deliver an unparalleled suite of best-in-class solutions and services. Our name embodies our ambition to continue moving the real-time communications industry forward.

Ribbon isn’t just about connecting point “a” to point “b.” It is about an all-encompassing ability to ensure a massively growing number of digital contact points is easier and more elegantly provisioned, registered, managed, monitored - and secured.

With the world more complexly woven together than ever before, the real-time communications we rely on must become more engaging, contextual and immersive.

Ribbon ties it all together, while remaining agile enough to connect across all digital domains, and support the demands of this increasingly digital world.

The Difference Is Real - And Really Exciting

When two industry leaders become one, we scale to deliver even more value to our collective customer community, continuing to deliver the critical session management capabilities that support the majority of VoIP calls thanks to our presence in so many of the world’s networks, the interconnection of the PSTN and public Internet, and that make possible predictable and efficient network and service operations.

Beyond our core business, built on world-class technology and intellectual property, as a larger company with a stronger team and the resources required to continually push the envelope on behalf of our customers and partners, we are also able to accelerate the innovation the industry needs to remain competitive and relevant in a digitally different world.

Even as we continue to transform fixed, mobile and enterprise networks from legacy environments to secure IP and cloud-based architectures, we are also developing more and more "as-a-service" offerings, including our Kandy Real Time Communications platform, with its APIs and SDKs supporting the development of communications solutions we call "wrappers" - designed to be white labeled and sold by our customers to their customers, as an alternative to the challengers OTT and embedded communications features which are threatening market share and profit margins.

The Kandy CPaaS is Ribbon’s disruptive cloud communications platform that allows anyone to easily add voice, video, messaging, presence, and collaboration capabilities directly into their mobile and web applications. It is a real-time software development platform built from Ribbon’s core communications, presence, security and real-time technologies. It enables service providers, enterprises, software vendors, systems integrators, partners and developers to enrich their applications and services with real-time contextual communications, providing a more engaging user experience.

At Perspectives 18 we'll be sharing continued advances in this area, which is redefining the future for CSPs and the businesses they serve, whether to enable Microsoft's new Teams offering to work better over premium SIP networks, or to make any enterprise communications platform more performant and secure, through initiatives like the one we announced with Verizon earlier this year.

We Love LA! 

With locations in 27 countries around the globe, our continually evolving, market-leading portfolio is empowering service providers and enterprises with rapid service creation using fully virtualized environments and network infrastructure, along with a new level of security for real-time communications.

We'll have representation from nearly all of those countries, a virtual "United Nations of Real Time Communications," and a rich diversity in the range of CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, CSOs, product developers, product managers, ecosystem partners, cloud services channel partners, and above all great customers!

We'll be covering a lot of ground over the four days, from inspiring keynote speeches reaching into the future to changes in our industry happening now.

We'll be diving deeply into next generation of cloud communications technology including Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and 4G/VoLTE (Voice over Long Term Evolution)-based solutions, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi), video, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Unified Communications (UC).

We'll be spending a lot of time talking about securing IP networks, with a "Ribbon" of security software that makes everything work in a cloud-centered, mobile-first world and bring together some of the most talented individuals in our industry with our own world-class services team experienced in the design, deployment and maintenance of some of the world's largest IP networks.

We'll also share case studies in the financial, government, education and healthcare sectors, the leaders in digital transformation, made possible by secure IP networking that scales to support contextual, collaborative, and constant communications fueling productivity and competitiveness.

Our Real Difference: Our Passion For Customers

Ribbon has customers throughout the world including leading service providers and massive enterprises. We wouldn't be the company we are were it not for these longstanding, loyal relationships built over two decades. Not only do these customers buy from us, they partner with us, and most of all - they push us to be great. Their challenges are our challenges, and our solutions are their solutions.

The real Ribbon is one that not only ties technology together, but ties our industry together.

We are so fortunate to be a part of this communications revolution!

At this first Ribbon Perspectives conference, June 3-7 downtown in the City of Angels, above all else we will be celebrating the weaving together of the continually flowing and growing industry so many of us grew up in, even as we continue to grow to support the digital differences that can make a real difference in our increasingly connected world.

Patrick