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When you joined GENBAND in 2004, what was your 5-year vision for the company? Is GENBAND there yet?
Some would say we got there two years ago, but from where I sit, we're in the third inning of a nine inning ball game. Our vision five years ago was to become telecom's core infrastructure gateway thought-leader and market-share leader. According to Infonetics and Synergy Research data, you can argue that we have accomplished both of these goals. Our product portfolio has grown from a single, mid-sized access media gateway to a family of gateways that range from small to high-density, perform a variety of functions from media to session border control to security, and support fixed, mobile and converged networks. In the last five years, we have shipped more than 45 million gateway ports, bringing our lifetime total to over 50 million ports deployed worldwide.
Over the past 10 years, the market has experienced significant consolidation among service providers. We anticipate that over the next two years equipment suppliers as a whole will consolidate and focus more on core competencies and profitability, resulting in some product divestiture.
As we enter the fourth inning, GENBAND is in a strong position to build on our vision, boldness, pedigree and experience as a strategic consolidator, having successfully executed and integrated three major acquisitions over the past three years.
Stay-tuned.
Were you the driving force behind the name change from General Bandwidth to GENBAND? How does it reflect who GENBAND is?
The name GENBAND was a direct result of a branding campaign centered on "change" - change in management, change in vision, change in culture and change in expectations. The GENBAND brand reflects management's "boldness" and efficiency. Spending quality time with our customers, partners and employees when I first joined the company, I found they were already shortening the original name General Bandwidth with "GENBAND", so frankly the name change came easy and captured our intent.
This company has enjoyed unprecedented success, especially over the past five years. What have been the biggest roadblocks along the way and why do you think GENBAND's been successful in overcoming them?
Our biggest roadblocks in the early years were a lack of scale as well as the business challenges that resulted from the telecom melt-down (2001-2006) and again in 2008 resulting from a global recession. GENBAND has persevered over the years, becoming a dominant marketshare leader. We did it by raising the required working capital; introducing new products; securing new patents; acquiring strategic technology, customers and scale; teaming with marquee business partners such as Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens, NEC, Nortel and Samsung; and by growing our global customer base to include 65 of the top 100 service providers spanning 80 countries.
If you look at every successful company, each has the following "success factors" – great leadership, great people, a strong company culture and focus. Vision, innovative products and services, market-timing, sales and financial performance are all results of having the right leadership, people, culture and focus. That is exactly what we have at GENBAND.
Where would you like to take GENBAND over the next 10 years?
Ten years in any industry is a long time, especially in telecom. I believe our industry will go through at least one, maybe two more cycles of consolidation. I expect we will see further consolidation among content, fixed, cable and mobile service providers, which will ultimately drive software and hardware equipment suppliers to further consolidate. Tier 1 service providers have already signaled that scale, price and system integration are priorities. With venture capital placing fewer bets in telecom, the net result will be fewer start-ups and less innovation. For established companies such as GENBAND, the next 10 years represent an opportunity to innovate in growth areas such as IMS, LTE and FMC – three technology areas that
will be hitting their stride10 years from now.
What do you think has been the biggest change in the company since it was founded?
Expectations. When you are a small company in the early idea and development mode, expectations are based on milestones, with little to no "customer" responsibility. The game changes when you begin selling and shipping products, turning up networks and scaling the company to meet the needs of some of the largest network operators in the world.
Working for a company like GENBAND must be like being part of a family, especially in your position. What do you take most pride in today as you watch this family celebrate its 10th anniversary?
Over time, every successful company shapes itself and develops an identity or "culture." What I am most proud of is the passion, commitment, "will" and unselfishness our employees amplify. The average GENBAND employee tenure is more than six years – for a company celebrating its10-year anniversary, that speaks volumes for our management team, vision/direction, peers and company values.
What is your fondest memory at GENBAND?
Architecting the acquisition of Tekelec's switching division (Santera, Taqua and Vocal Data). Many people may not be aware that I was part of the original management team at Santera, as well as the former CEO of Taqua, and following Tekelec's acquisition of Santera and Taqua, led the acquisition of Vocal Data.
For me, to come full circle seven years later, acquiring those valuable and familiar assets as the CEO of GENBAND was something I couldn't have scripted or imagined could have worked so well. Today, I sit in the same office that I occupied in 2000.
While the Tekelec switching division transaction was memorable for me personally, the net result was securing the technology for the industry's most scalable and flexible media gateway, the "G9." Over the next 12-18 months, we successfully secured strategic partnerships centered around the G9 with Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens and NEC.
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Watch the video to see the space savings PAETEC realized with our solution and hear what they say about GENBAND.
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PAETEC offers data, voice and value-added services throughout the United States, serving over 80 percent of the top 100 Metropolitan Areas. In their previous 19 market rollouts, PAETEC used GENBAND's G9 Gateways and C3 Signaling Controllers as an overlay to their legacy Class 5 infrastructure. When the company recently expanded into the Bay Area, they chose to deploy the G9/C3 solution in their first native IP site.
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The GENBAND solution provides a full-featured alternative to traditional services, while helping PAETEC significantly reduce their environmental impact, as well their operating costs and capital investment. The GENBAND system is expected provide a 78% reduction in power consumption relative to a traditional switch, with an equal savings again in power for cooling. This could amount to over 200,000 kWh each year in power off of the grid.
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The S3 Session Boarder Controller (SBC) is managed by the feature rich GenView-RSM EMS that provides enhanced visibility and QoS via on-demand session reports on session statistics such as ASR and QoS, actionable alarms to feed back into SLA policies, and tools for granular troubleshooting and diagnostics.
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Many large operators today are challenged with delivering a truly ubiquitous global voice service offering when the requirements demand them to embrace multiple regions and various technologies. This often leads to fragmented solution approaches that are both economically inefficient and operationally complex. This problem is more evident within the global service provider landscape where common services need to be extended into multiple geographic regions worldwide. Service providers around the globe are informing GENBAND that they need global interconnect solutions that meet a range of functionality and scalability goals (low to extremely high), in a highly economical fashion. The network should be capable of addressing the operator's national in-country requirements, while seamlessly being capable of expanding and growing internationally to meet the longer-term objectives for service volumes. It is also extremely critical to the operator that the selected platform exhibits a high degree of future-proofing that is capable of meeting the ever-changing demands of next generation networks.
Key attributes of a typical global interconnect network.
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International Long Distance (ILD), interconnect and interop to other carriers
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Number management and routing
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Mobile network support (BICC) and interconnect to IPX, as defined in GSMA
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Comprehensive billing functionality
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Simplicity of Operational & Managerial support
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Pass through support of advanced functions (presence, location info, etc.)
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A cost effective, scalable and re-usable solution
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Interop and interworking to other networks and solutions
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Future growth and expansion of such a network should also provide:
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Mobile interconnect traffic – BICC and AMR codecs
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Transcoding requirements
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Global VoIP – NNI (SIP and SIP-I)
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Integration into core routing databases for national and international routing (ENUM)
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Large incremental growth of existing SIP interconnect traffic
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Scalable, cost effective and manageable solution
across multiple PoPs
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GENBAND provides the ability to address all of these requirements, serving both today's and tomorrow's global interconnect challenges. Taking into account today's requirements and the anticipated future requirements of a typical operator, GENBAND delivers a solution based upon its comprehensive product portfolio. Consisting of the GENBAND C3 Media Gateway Controllers, G-Series gateways and S-Series session border controllers, coupled with the industry leading management platforms, GENBAND is the only supplier that can offer such a flexible range of solutions.
With the GENBAND product set, operators are assured of an end-to-end, manageable solution that caters for the ever-changing course of NGN and IMS networks, by offering repurposable solutions. This enables operators to deliver both the technical requirements and meet the business goals regarding CapEx and OpEx expenditures.
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The Session Routing Proxy is a high-performance, featurerich platform designed to enhance and scale wholesale domestic and international carrier networks. This platform complements existing GENBAND S3 Session Border Controller and C3/G9 solutions by expanding their routing capability via a stateless SIP redirect routing proxy and leverages current GenView interworking and provisioning. The routing proxy also interworks with other equipment provider platforms for TDM-IP and IP-IP interconnect thereby seamlessly bridging multi-vendor and multi-network islands.
Benefits to service providers include:
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Highly scalable routing engine
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Comprehensive routing support – including jurisdiction-based routing, least cost, lossless least cost routing, percentage based routing
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Carrier grade redundancy
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Flexible rating and route provisioning tools
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Integrated with GENBAND S3 SBC/RSM and C3/G9 platforms for centralized or distributed network configurations
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Multi-vendor platforms that can leverage centralized or distributed routing capabilities via SIP redirect
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Easy to configure and install
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Stay tuned for additional information on GENBAND's latest product launch.
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As part of Ernst & Young's Strategic Growth Leadership Series, GENBAND CEO, Charlie Vogt, joined an esteemed panel to discuss one of the most important issues facing companies today: where to find growth capital in these difficult economic times.
"This turbulent economy is curtailing growth in all industries, but the truly innovative, high-growth companies are seizing opportunities in the downturn," said Maria Pinelli, Americas Director, Strategic Growth Markets, Ernst & Young LLP. "With capital hard to come by, we're pleased
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to assemble an all-star panel of entrepreneurs, investors and advisors who have the track records and first hand experience to discuss this critical topic. GENBAND has consistently ranked as one of the fastest growing companies over the past two years despite the downturn and we're pleased Mr. Vogt will be able to share his perspective."
Moderated by Deborah Norville, the June 25th webcast featured respected investors, advisors and entrepreneurs discussing various sources for alternative capital. View the webcast below.
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In response to market demand to migrate aging TDM switches and expand broadband voice services, the two market leaders have tightly coupled BroadSoft's BroadWorks VoIP application platform with GENBAND's G9 and G6 Gateways and C3 Signaling Controller, as well as the S3 Session Border Controller. These best-in-class solutions combine to offer affordable switch migration that extends beyond legacy functionality, delivering new sources of revenue. PAETEC, one of the largest competitive telecommunication carriers in the nation, validates that the combined
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GENBAND BroadSoft solution has enabled them to create a broad suite of voice solutions as they migrate their customers to next generation voice over IP services. Sanjay Hiranandani, PAETEC's Senior Vice President of Engineering, notes that "the solution has helped us significantly reduce our environmental impact, operating costs, and capital investment required to support existing voice infrastructure, and deliver a state-of-the-art enterprise-focused product set."
Read More
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GENBAND was recently recognized by Comerica Bank Collin 60 as the fastest growing private company in the high-tech county where the company is headquartered. At an awards ceremony sponsored by Comerica Bank and the Collin County Business Press held in May, GENBAND CEO, Charlie Vogt, accepted the award on behalf of the company and its employees.
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Who's Talking About GENBAND?
It seems everyone is talking about the economy and its impact on business. In the telecom industry we've all felt the impact and good news is hard to come by. In fact, the number of companies doing well can be counted on one hand. Through this difficult time, one of the few companies that continues to get talked about is GENBAND. Here is a sampling of some of the GENBAND industry buzz.
In the first quarter, GENBAND captured the number one position in the world for both wireless gateway ports and trunking media gateway ports shipped.
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"GENBAND's trunk media gateway shipments and revenue growth stood out in the first quarter in what was otherwise a tough quarter for the industry," said Diane Myers, Infonetics' Directing Analyst for Service Provider VoIP and IMS. "They led our ‘movers and shakers' category with the highest increases in revenue and shipments. While economic conditions have exacerbated an industry pause in shipments across the board, GENBAND's achievements during the quarter
were noteworthy."
Diane Myers, Infonetics Research
GENBAND UNLEASHES MONSTER GATEWAY
"GENBAND today unveiled the mother of all session border gateways, the 14-slot S9... It's the most highly scalable session border controller and IP routing solution in the market."
Carol Wilson, Telephony Magazine
"...GENBAND's continued investments and enhancements to its flagship G9 platform positions the company to play an increasing role in the ongoing migration of TDM networks to IP... By broadening the G9's transcoding and femtocell capabilities, GENBAND is further strengthening the versatility of the G9 and making it increasingly attractive to a variety of operators – fixed, GSM, CDMA, converged – for a variety of deployment scenarios.
Joe McGarvey, Current Analysis
"The enhanced S3 offers operators compelling capabilities that reduce CapEx and OpEx and deliver new applications. The S3's interconnect routing features position GENBAND among the SBC market leaders and GENBAND's enhancements offer even more control to IP network operators."
Stephane Teral, Infonetics Research
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