Network Infrastructure

GENBAND Offers a Taste of KANDY

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  September 30, 2014

The arrival of the over-the-top application and the connected consumer has changed the game both for service providers and for businesses of all types. The new, quick rate of change means organizations need to get solutions to market more quickly, and deliver better and faster customer service. GENBAND (News - Alert) is addressing all of the above with a new solution called KANDY.

KANDY, which was previewed in June at GENBAND Perspectives14 in Orlando, is a platform-as-a-service that allows service providers like the telcos to expose their network resources using APIs, SDKs, and Quick Starts so developers can more easily leverage them to bring real-time communications to their applications.

The great thing about KANDY is that it enables businesses to connect with their customers in the places they choose to be and work, and it allows them expedite the introduction real-time communications features in the interfaces of their choice by providing an array of network resources in easy-to-use building blocks, according to GENBAND. Importantly, it also allows GENBAND’s customers, the service providers, to insert themselves into the OTT application value chain.

KANDY changes everything – it lets you build an OTT experience “LEGO style” using only the components you need, Roy Timor-Rousso, CEO of GENBAND fring (News - Alert), explained. It lets companies, be they the service providers or other developers, quickly bring new over-the-top services to market and to customize them to address particular customer needs, he continued.

Adding real-time communications to an application has traditionally required specialized skills, but with KANDY, GENBAND explained, developers’ tool belts just became much more powerful.

In a presentation in which he stated “resistance is futile” and wore Willy Wonka-style glasses, Paul Pluschkell, executive vice president of strategy and cloud services at GENBAND, said KANDY will help create new business models and new consumption models.

Pluschkell and his colleagues demonstrated how KANDY can help bring together customer transaction history. This demo showed a scenario in which a customer had a check that didn’t clear, so he was overcharged. The customer was able to connect in real time via video chat with a representative at his bank, who was able to fix the issue immediately.

Another demonstration highlighted a sporting goods retailer that uses crowdsourcing to enable online shoppers to get information in real time from others who have purchased the products they are considering buying. Shoppers can use the same app to contact customer support, tapping once to launch a real-time video interaction. KANDY was used to bring real-time communications capabilities to all of the above, in the process reducing friction in the sales process.

KANDY and WebRTC, another technology of which GENBAND is a big proponent, are also useful in bringing real-time communications to dispatch and field service applications. GENBAND highlighted a transportation service for elderly patients called DriverBuddy (News - Alert), which allows drivers and dispatchers to video chat, and access geolocation information for routing purposes.

“A big portion of KANDY is WebRTC,” Brad Bush (News - Alert), GENBAND executive vice president and chief marketing officer, said during his speech about WebRTC Use Cases.

Companies of all stripes are struggling to deal with the rapid rate of change, and with competition, said Pluschkell. KANDY gives those companies the ammunition to address that change and the fact that the always-on customer now has a lot of power in the marketplace. He described KANDY as innovation in a box that enables organizations to share and be shared.




Edited by Maurice Nagle