eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Genband is rolling out a cloud-based communications service that service providers and channel partners can rebrand and sell to businesses and consumers.
Genband’s Nuvia unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution includes everything from high-definition video and voice to multimedia messaging, Web collaboration, conferencing, messaging, and the convergence of fixed and mobile services.
The company, which almost three years ago bulked up its communications capabilities by buying Nortel Networks’ carrier communications business, unveiled Nuvia Feb. 12, part of a larger initiative that officials call the company’s “making networks smarter” initiative. The communications solutions touch on a host of areas, including IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), rich communications suites (RCS), voice over LTE (VoLTE), and session border controllers (SBC), which are found at the intersections of networks. There also is a UC portion as well as a cloud segment, of which Nuvia is a part.
“As service providers relentlessly work to meet market challenges, they require smarter networks with software, solutions and intelligence that span multiple technology and compatibility chasms at the core, edges and application layers of networks,” Genband President and CEO Charlie Vogt said in a statement. The new solutions “are required by our customers to deliver superior user experiences that make their networks and service offerings more secure, scalable, efficient and profitable.”
Nuvia is a key solution, enabling service providers and channel partners to offer their customers a broad cloud-based communications solution that includes such advantages as a pay-as-you-grow business model. In addition, the service providers and channel partners can customize the solution by hanging their own services on the Nuvia offering, enabling them to differentiate their offering from competitors, according to Joe McGarvey, director of analyst relations at Genband.
The white-label cloud solution will be hosted on Genband’s infrastructure, though eventually it will expand to public clouds as well, McGarvey told eWEEK.
“This is a cloud deployment of unified communications that service providers and resellers can rebrand,” he said.
Genband’s UCaaS offering includes the company’s global professional services support, and comes with management and administrative portals designed for ease of use, officials said.
“Nuvia offers service providers a radically different model for deploying communications services from what is available today,” Jeff Townley, president of Genband’s Services Business Unit and global operations, said in a statement. “Service providers and channel partners can leverage Nuvia’s unprecedented deployment options, including hybrid models with the ability to augment the Nuvia-delivered services with in-house applications, to deliver customers a unique, customized and cost-effective alternative to services derived from premises-based equipment.”
Nuvia is a piece of Genband’s “smart” efforts to offer network services providers the tools they need to ramp up traffic and revenue. The company is offering such solutions as Continuum for IMS, session controllers and gateways that are needed inside carrier’s core networks, and Quantix, for the network edge. The Experius brand is for the user experience, and includes the UC applications for end users.
McGarvey said Genband has been ramping up its capabilities for the past few years through both in-house development and acquisitions, including its 2007 purchase of Tekelec’s switching business, the 2008 acquisition of NextPoint Networks, which makes session border controllers, and Nortel’s carrier business in 2010.
Each acquisition grew the company’s size and capabilities significantly, he said.
Genband’s announcements come days after enterprise software giant Oracle was bulking up its own networking services capabilities by spending $1.7 billion to buy Acme Packet, which offers such products as SBCs, multiservice security gateways (MSGs) and session routing proxies (SRPs).
Genband’s Vogt said that Oracle’s acquisition of Acme validated what his company is doing.
“It’s actually good for Genband, really, but it’s not a shocker,” he told Eric Krapf, a program co-chair for the Enterprise Connect UC show, in a blog on the No Jitter Website. “We feel like there’s a huge convergence, not just fixed and wireless, but the core to the edge to the user experience.”