Ribbon Continues to Wrap Around Teams as Demand for Microsoft's Popular Platform Surges

Ribbon Continues to Wrap Around Teams as Demand for Microsoft's Popular Platform Surges

By Arti Loftus, Special Correspondent  |  August 07, 2020

After several years of development across the Microsoft real-time communications stack, starting with innovation in improving the quality and security of Skype (News - Alert) for Business before Teams was launched, Ribbon Communications continues to roll in new calling, security, and licensing capabilities in Teams.

Ribbon, which has been acquiring companies and leveraging their strengths to further develop IP communications infrastructure and applications, has been innovating in VoIP security, as a pioneer carrier-grade Switches and Session Border Controllers, and were one of the first to virtualize their entire offering, making their software available to run on bare metal, commercial-off-the-shelf blade servers.

And most recently, Ribbon announced it has sold the popular Kandy.io Communications Platform as a Service to AVCtechnologies, which will add the proprietary, multi-tenant cloud communications platform to their cloud-IT offerings.  The combination creates a comprehensive suite of Unified Communications (News - Alert) as a Service (UCaaS), Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) capabilities which AVCtechnologies will further drive with their over 30 years of experience delivering white-glove customer service to enterprise customers across a range of managed IT solutions.

"We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Kandy, which is a major step in strengthening our ability to deliver a comprehensive set of cloud solutions and managed services offerings to our customers," said AVCtechnologies CEO Darrell J. Mays. "We are extremely fortunate to be able to acquire Kandy, which has built one of the most impressive and advanced cloud communication platforms in the world."

Founded in 2014, Kandy is a global provider of complex deployments of UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS for mid-market and enterprise customers across its powerful, proprietary multi-tenant, highly scalable cloud platform. The Kandy platform also includes pre-built customer engagement tools, based on WebRTC technology, known as Kandy Wrappers, and provides white-labeled services to a variety of customers, including communications service providers and systems integrators.

Bruce McClelland, Ribbon's CEO, stated, "We are extremely impressed with the tremendous depth of talent and vision of the AVCtechnologies' management team and believe that with the addition of the talented and innovative Kandy team, the company will continue to thrive and flourish. We expect the combination of the two entities to generate significant growth and value, and we are excited to be a shareholder of the combined company. "Over the last twenty years, Ribbon has continually expanded their solutions to the "northbound" layers of the OSI stack, and with the acquisition of a part of the Nortel business, became expert in not only network infrastructure supporting the massive growth of VoIP, but in telephony in general with hundreds of government and enterprise clients with the most demanding requirements for quality, availability, and security. 

During the Enterprise Connect Digital Conference & Expo 2020 taking place virtually, of course, August 3-6, the company also demonstrated new calling capabilities for Microsoft Teams, along with enhanced security features for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"This was an Enterprise Connect conference like no other; however, the virtual event will offer an innovative way to showcase many of the solutions that have helped our enterprise customers successfully manage the global pandemic," said Patrick Joggerst (News - Alert), Chief Marketing Officer for Ribbon. "Our customers have had to quickly adapt by expanding their use of secure unified communications (UC) capabilities, and now we will be using many of these same tools to connect with them during this event. We want to show our customers that we are continually innovating and introducing new solutions that make it easier for them to securely connect to existing IP PBX platforms whether its Microsoft 365, Amazon Chime, cloud contact center solutions, Cloud UC services and of course leading tier-one service providers around the globe."

Joggerst added, "Ribbon is committed to open standards so that our customers are assured support for the most compelling solutions deployed in public or private cloud environments. Our market-proven portfolio is already deployed in some of the largest enterprise networks, including the US Department of Defense, the City of Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin."

Ribbon spoke about and demonstrated:

  • Microsoft-certified solutions that enable Microsoft Teams voice calling via Direct Routing to communications service providers' (CSP (News - Alert)) networks worldwide
  • Advanced Cloud UC, Contact Center and Communications APIs that deliver carrier-grade UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS capabilities
  • US government-certified Session Border Control (SBC) solutions for:
    • Public or Private Cloud
    • Core or Edge deployments
    • Software or appliance-based infrastructure
    • Powerful orchestration and analytics tools
  • Packet and Optical solutions for enabling 5G and private enterprise networks

Ribbon has the largest portfolio of session border controllers (SBCs) certified for Microsoft Phone (News - Alert) System Direct Routing.  Carriers can offer their customers SIP trunks that connect to Microsoft Teams.  A Direct Routing solution that includes a Ribbon SBC is fully supported by Microsoft.


Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Maurice Nagle

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