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Update on Genband 2016

June 16, 2016 by Dave Michels Free Download

Genband provides real-time communications software and solutions for service providers, integrators, and enterprises. Its brand is well known within the industry, but not particularly well with end-users largely because its channel partners use their own brands. I attended their partner event, Genband Perspectives, last month for the second time.

Perspectives is an unusual conference because Genband is an unusual company. Genband acquired some of Nortel’s assets, so its customer base actually goes back longer than Genband does. Its products include UC products and services, SBCs, media gateways, FMC solutions, wireless access gateways, and more. From a UC perspective its primary competitors are likely BroadSoft and MetaSwitch. However, it also has a CPaaS service that competes with Twilio and Nexmo. Actually, I suspect Genband’s total list of competitors is pretty long.

Perspectives is an unusual conference because Genband is an unusual company. Genband acquired some of Nortel's assets, so its customer base actually goes back longer than Genband does. Its products include UC products and services, SBCs, media gateways, FMC solutions, wireless access gateways, and more. From a UC perspective its primary competitors are likely BroadSoft and MetaSwitch. However, it also has a CPaaS service that competes with Twilio and Nexmo. Actually, I suspect Genband's total list of competitors is pretty long.

The topics at Perspectives included WebRTC, NFV, SDN, and APIs. The exhibitors on the floor included Vidyo, IBM, SAP, Arrow, and Blackbox. Genband brands include Fring, SPiDR, Kandy, Nuvia, Q21, GENCom.

Genband is a mature carrieresque company with a startup culture within it trying to get out. A good example of that is Kandy which competes directly against CPaaS poster-kid Twilio.

Kandy and Twilio are CPaaS competitors, but Twilio is basically an un-carrier. Twilio competes with carriers functionally and conceptually. Kandy provides carriers with CPaaS tools that can leverage their own networks. I get confused if I should think of Twilio or the carriers (with Kandy) as David or Goliath?

Download this free 2Pager for a general update on Genband - specifically the UC and CPaaS elements of the portfolio.

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By Dave Michels

Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.