Back in 1999, Genband was launched during the .com bust, but the company came out alive thanks to its long-term investors. In 2004, Genband was a one product company with no revenue and 80 people, but found an opportunity to accelerate its market by using new and innovative technology.
“During that time, a lot of small companies couldn’t break through like we did,” said Charlie Vogt (News - Alert), CEO of Genband in the ITEXPO Miami 2013 keynote presentation this morning.
In fact, on February 12th, Genband is launching a brand new campaign focusing on making networks smarter. Through its experience, the company has observed that businesses today must reinvent themselves in order to take advantage of the new technology that is available.
Over the last two decades, the industry has undergone a great deal of change. In the 2000 era, according to Vogt, VoIP was where technology was headed, but now it is all about voice and video interaction. Now in 2013, SIP trunking is regaining popularity.
“We’ve taken the VoIP and SIP-based technology and we now feel like our company is on the leading edge of WebRTC and HTML5,” said Vogt. “We can deliver exciting services that can be delivered from the traditional service provider and new cloud service provider.”
Looking further into the future, Vogt foresees a very exciting, chaotic period of time that will also bring some challenges. It is great time to be a consumer, but it’s not necessarily an exciting time to be a CIO, IT manager or service provider. “They have to compete in this chaotic marketplace with the introduction of smartphones - the mobile office of the future,” he explained.
Ultimately, Vogt predicts that companies that are able to figure out how to deliver a simple communications offering on smart devices to create the ultimate mobile office will be “the winners.”
There is an endless amount of opportunity for small companies to take advantage of bandwidth and platforms that will be available.
“Consumers are living in this new world being able to take advantage of all these cool applications, but the next seven years is going to be about the business and enterprise,” Vogt explained, “So, how are we going to make the same excitement for the enterprise world?”
Today, Genband is putting a great deal of emphasis on helping IT managers and CIOs adapt to this change. The company is very focused on providing the right tools to help carriers maintain success in the future world.
Overall, the service providers own access so they aren’t going away, however, their business may change, according to Vogt, so they need to figure out exactly who they want to be.
“We spent most of our time trying to dynamically change the landscape for service providers because service providers can’t change as fast as the market wants them to change,” he commented.
Business, enterprise and carriers have the single biggest challenge and Genband has been scratching its head wondering how it can help them. And, the cloud is the answer. For the average business, cloud services can completely de-risk a deployment strategy and provide the opportunity to take advantage of new services.
Vogt explained, “In fact, there are a lot of entrepreneurs that will look to cloud to change and enable a stagnant business climate today.”
The opportunity for a new business model is something that companies like Genband are spending a significant amount of time thinking about because businesses need new models in order to participate in this new world.
He concluded, “It has been a humbling ten years, and this next decade is going to be really exciting. It feels very innovative, it feels like there is a lot of hope.”
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Edited by Brooke Neuman