Just a few weeks after closing the acquisition of Nortel's Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions Business (CVAS), Genband is ready to talk about its product strategy.
There wasn't much product overlap since Genband acquired Nortel's CVAS unit. In fact, where Genband had about 500 employees before the acquisition, it now has about 3,000, including contract engineers.
While such an integration might sound like a daunting task, Genband points to its experience in acquiring bigger companies. In 2007, it acquired Tekelec's switching solutions group, which at the time was about five times bigger, according to Mehmet Balos, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Genband.
Over the past several weeks, Genband has been holding a lot of employee meetings all over the world and getting them acquainted with their new owner. With the combined Nortel and Genband assets, the company now boasts about 600 service providers around the world as customers and of the top 100 operators, two-thirds of them are Genband clients, Balos says.
One of the overall messages the company is trying to convey is simplicity for service providers, and the "GENiUS" platform is one step toward that. It's the cornerstone of the new roadmap and will include Genband's application, call control, session border and security product lines. The company says its A-Series Applications Portfolio is a central component of its vision for next-generation networks and IMS.
IMS has been a goal in the wireless industry for years now and the economy likely played a role in its lack of deployment. However, since last summer, there's been a general trend toward more adoption, Balos says.
Infonetics Research yesterday released results of recent surveys it conducted with service providers; it has been surveying them about their IMS plans for six years now. This year's results represent a turning point, with IMS now perceived as becoming a more mature technology. Although fixed-line VoIP continues to dominate deployments, there is a clear rise in plans for mobile services over IMS by 2012, according to analyst Diane Myers.
In the Infonetics study, Ericsson continued to be the leading IMS vendor in terms of equipment installed by operators in the survey, followed by Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent. Genband wasn't present in the vendor ratings; until now, Genband's placing in IMS networks has been through its channel and OEM partners, Myers says.
Genband also announced changes to other products. For example, the Adaptive Application Engine, or A2E, and the Wireless Call Continuity platform, or WMG 6000, acquired from Nortel now will be known as the A2 and the A6, respectively.