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Genband officials want to make it easier for organizations, service providers and developers to build communications capabilities into their Web and mobile applications.
The company is rolling out Kandy, a real-time communications software development platform that includes APIs, software development kits (SDKs) and what officials are calling “quick starts”—essentially prebuilt applications that already include communications, such as video shopping assistance. The idea is that applications built via the Kandy platform-as-a-service solution will enable users to communicate with colleagues, partners or customers directly from the application, without having to close it.
People using such an application can communicate with a customer, ask a question or get a live update in real time through the application itself, without having to access another one.
Genband officials announced Kandy at an event Sept. 16 that included a range of customers and partners—including SAP and IBM—that already had begun using the platform.
According to CEO David Walsh, Kandy leverages not only Genband’s cloud and WebRTC offerings, but also technologies inherited via recent acquisitions such as fring, with its over-the-top (OTT) mobile IP communications service, and uReach, which brought with it a portfolio of unified communications (UC) products. The technologies combined “deliver the most comprehensive real-time communications offering for mobile and Web,” Walsh said in a statement.
According to Paul Pluschkell, Genband’s executive vice president of strategy and cloud services and founder of Kandy, the new platform will enable businesses to participate in an environment where communication is being done in real time.
“To date, our communications advances are simply this; we spend too much time messaging and not enough time communicating,” Pluschkell wrote in a post on the company blog. “The common thread that we can weave together is our desire to help our customers communicate and collaborate in Real Time with impact. … Kandy reimagines the entire communications process. We no longer require stand alone or vertical UC and social solutions. Kandy brings together the best of creative expression and already created real time solutions so that you can do business with impact, simply and powerfully without breaking the bank.”
At a time when “data has become the voice of the customer … successful companies will create processes that match what we know about our customers online with the information we know about them offline. Extracting information from CRM, services data, data warehouses, third party data and most importantly real time data. In this scenario data and communications services are not simply combined they are seamlessly integrated into the user’s workflow,” he wrote.
The Kandy portal launched Sept. 16, with free developer trials at kandy.io. The portal includes a developer area, application showcase and a community in addition to developer API, SDK and quick start tools.
Genband’s history has been in hardware for the communications market, quickly expanded its capabilities in 2010 when it bought Nortel Networks’ carrier voice-over-IP business for $182 million, and is now pushing what officials say is a mobile-first strategy. Most recently, the company earlier this month brought its growing mobile communications capabilities under an umbrella called Simply Mobile, which includes many of the technologies gained through Genband’s various acquisitions.