GENBAND (News - Alert) is expanding. The company has opened a new worldwide corporate headquarters in Frisco, Texas, to accommodate senior management, sales, marketing, finance, legal and human resources teams that formerly were housed at GENBAND’s Plano campus. The street address is 2801 Network Boulevard.

The company plans to keep its Plano facility, which will continue to be used as a strategic service and support center as well as one of GENBAND’s five Product Centers of Excellence.

 “Our new corporate headquarters continues our strategic commitment to the Dallas Metroplex telecom corridor, combining the best and brightest technology talent with an unbeatable cost and quality of living,” said CEO Charlie Vogt. “With proximity to our existing Plano Global Design Center and the DFW International airport, we are well positioned for the rapid growth GENBAND is experiencing.”

Employees at the new location are being outfitted with the A2 Personal Communicator client application on their desktops, which works with the A2 Converged Application Server, to provide to instant messaging, phone and calendar presence, voice and video calling, conferencing and collaboration. 

As discussed in the August issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, a TMC (News - Alert) publication, GENBAND has become a formidable presence in telecom, with $800 million in expected pro forma revenue this year and 2,220 employees around the world.

The company is looking to do additional acquisitions, considering an IPO, working to achieve organic growth of 3 to 4 percent a year, and seeking to get to a 15 percent operating margin model by 2011.

GENBAND has done a number of acquisitions over the past few years. That includes purchasing NextPoint Networks in the fall of 2008, Tekelec’s Switching Solutions Group in April 2007, Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) Networks’ Surpass IP trunking gateway product lines in April 2008, and both BayPackets Inc. and the Digital Central Office business of Siemens Networks LLC in late 2006. However, what really helped move GENBAND to the next level was its recent purchase of Nortel’s (News - Alert) Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions Business, a deal it closed on May 28.

“There aren’t too many companies we can find that have gone from 80 people and a couple million dollars in sales to $800 million and 2,200 people six years later,” Vogt recently said to INTERNET TELEPHONY. “What we just pulled off was pretty amazing when you think about it. Granted, we’ve taken GENBAND, even prior to Nortel, over the last several years and built it into a $150 million business that’s doing well.

“It’s one thing to have the insight and the vision and all of that,” he continued. “It’s another thing to actually convince a pretty sophisticated board, a pretty sophisticated shareholder base, and then convince the largest bank in the world – JPMorgan – to put up $400 million for a company as small as were to take on something so large.”

Calling the deal transformational, Vogt says there hasn’t been a comparable one in the 25 years he’s been in the industry.

“When we were a $25 million [business], we acquired a $100-million division out of Tekelec (News - Alert),” he says. “Here, three years later, a $150-million business is buying a $650-million division out of bankruptcy.”