Texas-based cloud and hosted solutions provider GENBAND is setting its sights on the entrepreneurial and SMB (small to medium sized business) market, announcing the Innovation Exchange, a "collaborative business and technology exchange" which it says will enable SMBs to partner with Fortune 500 companies on application development. It also announced that it has partnered with F5, an application delivery networking provider, in a move to enhance its own cloud-based application delivery service.
 |
|
Vogt (Image source: GENBAND) |
While the announcements are only slightly related, the provider's goals become clearer in the details. The Innovation Exchange "brings together Fortune 500 organizations, such as IBM, Intel, and Samsung Mobile with smaller, entrepreneurial companies to address operators' critical needs by rapidly developing, testing and deploying new solutions," the press release said. Applications will be delivered using GENBAND's unified communications and "smart networking" technologies.
"The Internet has become an equalizer" between existing carriers and competitors who are entering the markets and riding aboard the existing networks, said Charles Vogt, CEO of GENBAND. The Innovation Exchange, he said, is intended to let the service providers meet those challenges and, in many instances, collaborate with the new competitors on complementary services.
"Service providers have a unique opportunity to leverage their networks," Vogt said.
At the same time, GENBAND's partnership with F5, and an in-tandem release of a new diameter signaling controller, the QUANTiX DSC, signals that the provider is making sure it can deliver on that rapid deployment goal, as well as meet existing market demand, by making it easier for IMS and LTE operators to scale their data roaming and voice capabilities as demand rises.
The partnership with F5 is intended to help service providers deliver voice, video and data across LTE networks, Vogt said.
In particular, the relationship will help enable VoLTE, said Tom Carter, vice president of worldwide sales - carrier service providers at F5, speaking during an afternoon keynote.
F5, he said, was "looking for a partner that had contracts, that had existing business" so that his company could take its existing software stack and work with GENBAND to do "things that are creative" by addressing the control plane, data plane and legacy core. It is, he said, part of F5's overall purpose to "scale enormously large web traffic" and help carriers "transform from connectivity to applications."
"Subscriber demand for bandwidth-hungry apps is placing strains on mobile networks and creating new complexities at the network edge for handling surging signaling traffic growth," said B.G. Kumar, president of GENBAND's Multimedia Business Unit, in the F5 announcement. "Mobile operators around the globe are adopting LTE at a significant rate."
A number of applications developed via the Innovation Exchange will be showcased at GENBAND's Perspectives13 conference, being held this week in Orlando.
For more:
- see the IX release
- and this release
Special Report: Network equipment vendors rake in service revenues
Related articles:
Verizon's Melone: Future rests on VoLTE, FiOS and IP backbone
BT employs GENBAND for its IP interconnect expansion effort
Week in research: Service delivery platforms on the rise; begun, the PON price wars have