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Genband, whose legacy has been in hardware for the communications market, for the past couple of years has aggressively been building out its mobile capabilities through in-house development and acquisitions of such companies as fring and uReach.
Now the vendor is bringing its increasingly broad range of mobile communications capabilities under an umbrella officials are calling Simply Mobile, which includes the fruits of its various acquisitions as well as its latest Wireless Access Gateway.
Genband, which rapidly grew is portfolio in 2010 when it bought Nortel Networks’ carrier voice-over-IP business for $182 million, has been in the mobile communications space for a while, according to Sanjay Bhatia, senior director of strategic marketing for the Texas company.
With Simply Mobile, the company “is making a statement that all of our approaches are mobile-first,” Bhatia told eWEEK.
Genband bought fring a year ago to help service providers deal with the rising threat of over-the-top (OTT) mobile apps and messaging software that enables users to bypass services offered by wireless carriers, costing them tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues. The uReach acquisition in February brought Genband more unified communications (UC) capabilities that officials said will help carriers modernize their infrastructures and services, reach new customers and make money from their mobile investments.
The technology inherited through those deals can be found in the Simply Mobile offerings, which were unveiled Sept. 3 and are designed to help carriers and enterprises go mobile at a time when consumers and business users are spending more time on such devices as smartphones and tablets and putting more demand on wireless networks.
Carriers also are dealing with other challenges brought on by the increasingly competitive mobile environment, from finding ways to retain the customers they have to extending their reach in the market, Bhatia said. Genband is looking to offer service providers a broad mobile platform to enable them to more quickly implement the services and capabilities they need to meet those challenges, he said.
The Simply Mobile offerings are meant to help carriers embed real-time communications into their mobile applications designed for specific verticals, compete with app developers with white-label pay-as-you-go OTT solutions that are cloud-based, and offer ubiquitous connectivity by integrating such technologies as small cells and WiFi into their cellular networks.
The Simply Mobile strategy is focusing on five areas, including offering a platform as a service (PaaS) comprising all of Genband’s APIs and services. The offerings will enable service providers to leverage cloud-based, embedded communications to quickly bring new services to market. At the same time, the cloud-based OTT solutions will enable them to offer new apps to consumers and businesses.
Genband’s technology also will help carriers and enterprises leverage intelligent mobile video messaging services, as well as expand mobile coverage capabilities through WiFi and small cells. The vendor’s Session Grid solutions are designed to make mobile communications more secure, manageable and interoperable regardless of the network, application or device being used.
The new Wireless Access Gateway is a multi-application platform that carriers can leverage to offer new services, including WiFi with Hotspot 2.0 for more seamless connectivity to roaming users and securely moving voice and data traffic from small cells and WiFi access points to an evolved packet core.
Genband will demonstrate the solutions in its Simply Mobile portfolio during the CTIA show in Las Vegas starting Sept. 9.