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.
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.
More people with smartphones…
More Internet access points with the growth of Wi-Fi and hot spots…
More developer platforms and the rise of real-time communications APIs…
The freelance economy is the future of work, even in the traditional workplace. Getting things done, especially in the hyper-connected information age, is happening more and more remotely, and is increasingly being measured in “job units.” How productive the coming generations of workers are will likely be measured less by “punching the clock” and more by “finishing the job” – one job after the other.
