Part two of a four part series:
Part one: Communications Without Boundaries
Part three: Embedded Communications
Part four: Digitization to Humanization

INTRODUCTION

2014 was a remarkable year at GENBAND, as we continued to bring better ways of working and communicating to our growing channel partner network, who in turn leveraged our cloud (NUViA) and platform (Kandy) as well as our SIP Trunking and Application Server offerings to improve their offerings – and bottom line profits.

As the holidays continue, and we all rest up for the exciting year ahead, I thought we’d share the constellation we see forming here at GENBAND in the expanding universe of Real-Time Communications software and solutions. We see software everywhere, in the network, at the edge, on the device, and embedded in applications. The evolution of the communications cloud and “communications-as-a-service” is continuing to skyrocket.  Here are seven streams of predictions.

In September I released the first version of my view of the current NFV landscape and ecosystems in an attempt to visually represent the key players in this movement.  Since the release of the initial version I have received some great feedback and have decided to update it for this quarter.

Key updates to the landscape include:

While M-Commerce has been all the rage over the last ten years, “M-Customer” is a term I’m coining in this column to describe customer engagement experiences through mobile devices. The innovation here has just begun and is closely linked to M-Commerce but pertains as much to customer retention and loyalty as it does to making the initial sale.

Today at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress, there has been significant discussion and debate around Open Source and ecosystems. Why do we need Open Source movements and communities such as OpenFlow, OpenStack, OpenPlatformNFV? Why are ecosystems such as HP OpenNFV, Intel Network Builders and Alcatel Lucent Cloudband important?

I am attending the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in Dusseldorf this week and the event kicked off with the Open Network Foundation/Software Defined Networking (ONF/SDN) Workshop chaired by Marc Cohn of ONF/Ciena for an exciting week of the latest on SDN, NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and Open Networking.

Question: What do Google, Telefonica, Cisco, Oracle, Yahoo, Fidelity, Snapchat and now Blackboard have in common?

Answer: They have all acquired or financed companies that offer Web Real-time Communications (WebRTC) solutions. Comcast, Amazon and NTT are a little different, they have chosen to build instead of buy.

As the participation in the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) domain continues to rapidly grow, it was getting difficult to keep straight which companies played in what aspect of the overall NFV landscape and architecture. Out of that murkiness was born this NFV landscape view as an attempt to visually represent participation in the movement.