January 26, 2012

The Year Ahead - with GENBAND's Mehmet Balos

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

TMCnet recently asked some of the leading lights in the industry for their thoughts about 2011 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Here’s what Mehmet Balos (News - Alert), chief marketing officer at GENBAND, had to say.

What was your company’s greatest achievement in 2011?

Balos: Two major milestones stand out in 2011. First, GENBAND successfully completed the integration of Nortel’s (News - Alert) IP Switching assets, which was the company’s largest acquisition in its history. The acquisition not only changed GENBAND but also changed the global telecom landscape. By acquiring Nortel CVAS and successfully integrating its products into GENBAND’s portfolio, we preserved many years of respected research and development and provided continuity for an enormous installed base, enabling carrier customers to cost effectively continue growth and delivery of services to global customer bases. At the core of this integration emerged the GENBAND GENiUS platform, which was the second major milestone of 2011.

Over the years, telecommunications technology has been deployed with separate platforms, separate operating systems and separate management systems for the key functions of call control, applications, session border control, and traffic and policy management. GENiUS is the first of its kind to bring them all together in a unified, IP-based, software-centric solution. IP applications are easily added to the GENiUS platform via simple software upgrades to the common ATCA hardware and application blades, significantly simplifying network architecture and reducing network costs. Thanks to smart integration of Nortel and GENBAND assets, we began significant deployments of GENiUS in 2011.

GENiUS is a proving very attractive to service providers, partners and suppliers as a foundation for delivery of future applications. GENiUS is a game changer for GENBAND, in part because we can now deploy a majority of our portfolio on one platform. This includes consumer voice and multimedia applications, business voice and multimedia applications, hosted cloud-based applications, mobile data offload, and IP access and interconnect security and border control.

What are your business’s goals for 2012?

Balos: To continue growth through our proven build, buy and partner model. From a build standpoint, we are planning to invest $130 million a year in R&D and innovation, with more than 1,000 R&D resources and five Centers of Excellence. Our history is one of aggressive yet disciplined growth. Our model has been to identify and acquire affordable, under-the-radar assets that become significantly more attractive when integrated into the GENBAND portfolio. We will continue to further that model and business goal in 2012.

Strategic partnerships have always been at the core of GENBAND’s success. We hope to continue to develop our relationships with companies such as Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson (News - Alert), NEC and Nokia Siemens Networks. We also have a major outsourced engineering partnership with Netas in Turkey, which is central to our partnership strategy. Lastly, we expect the most volume growth in partnerships to occur through developer community partnerships fueled by our GENFuzion Developer Community. This community will be another development resource for carriers to leverage, while providing developers a new vehicle for reaching new customers.

How would you describe your outlook for business and the economy at large heading into 2012?

Balos: Given the uncertain state of the macro economy, the big-picture outlook for 2012 can only be described as cautious optimism. Technology will continue to be the catalyst for continuous innovation and provide growth for the global economy. Looking beyond the macroeconomic uncertainty and the technology megatrends, there are many related trends to watch for that are shaping or reshaping different aspects of the global technology industry.

For example, the recession has been credited with accelerating the initial corporate adoption of cloud-based services, a growth market we uniquely address with GENBAND GENiUS and the A2 applications platform. In an industry as multifaceted, economically influential and extraordinarily fluid as the global technology industry, staying on top as a market-share leader has become more challenging than ever. But with a value proposition built on one of the most fundamental shifts in communications infrastructure history, today’s unparalleled transition from TDM to IP creates enormous opportunity for GENBAND innovation.

If there’s one thing you’d like to see happen related to business in the year ahead, what is that one thing?

Balos: IP network transformation. Network transformation is at the heart of what GENBAND does, and we believe it will be a significant 2012 trend as operators worldwide continue the transition and evolution of their networks to an all IP world. Driving this transformation is service providers’ interest in simplifying their networks, reducing costs and creating new revenue streams. Faced with a barrage of strategic trends that include cloud-based applications, IMS, LTE (News - Alert), social networking, and over-the-top multimedia content delivery, service providers are carefully honing their go-to-market strategies and service offering differentiation.

But to offer services anywhere, on any device, at any time, most networks must undergo IP network transformation. IP untethers the service set from a fixed location or device and opens a wide array of choices for end user customers. Yet these new IP services will only be consumed if the network can be trusted to provide a secure, consistent and dependable level of quality. GENBAND is uniquely positioned to provide a complete set of products and solutions to address our customers’ innovation demands.

If 2011 was the year of cloud and/or the year of the tablet, 2012 will be the year of...

Balos: monetizing over-the-top services. The growth of OTT video is placing pressure on infrastructure. In response, operators are introducing data capacity limits. In this environment, the current one-size-fits-all broadband service offerings do not meet the needs of either carriers or end users. These trends are forcing service and content providers to continually revisit their go-to-market strategies and service offering differentiation.

Mobile and fixed service providers are increasing investments in broadband and applications. Broadband subscriptions have surpassed one billion across fixed and mobile users in 2011, and will continue to grow aggressively; some analysts predict there will be approximately 5.5 billion broadband users in five years (2016). But as long as services are offered as big pipes, there is limited revenue growth across the industry. There is much more potential in the market to create revenue from broadband users whether fixed or mobile.

Concepts such as mass personalization allow our customers to unleash potential revenue and to define and deliver services suited to individual users’ needs. Mass personalization tools create a premium broadband experience by allowing each user to create a customized service experience and billing plan that best meets their needs. Mass personalization allows customers to create their own broadband packages with predictable billing and enables carriers to offer services like content optimization and video caching to capture incremental revenue for providing an improved user experience.

Blended services will provide a superior on-line experience that integrates social networking with communication services in innovative ways. A presence-enabled unified address book can leverage carrier network information to provide a richer, more accurate view of the user’s communications environment. Personas allow users to manage their online identity and services depending on the context, with unique profiles for work, home, travel, or special interests. A key part of an effective applications strategy will be to offer application programming interfaces to app developers to create a richer service environment that attracts more subscribers and increases network utilization per subscriber.

Advertising is a significant, but largely untapped, revenue source for carriers. Blended service offerings and a premium broadband experience place the carrier in an ideal position to offer targeted advertising. Carriers will be able to offer retail-advertising services with higher value conversion scenarios than competing advertising channels. They will also be able to act as a broker and offer wholesale advertising services that leverage customer preferences to deliver the most relevant ads to the consumer and to offer improved targeting to the retail advertisers.

GENBAND’s OTT integration toolkit allows carriers to embrace OTT services and generate additional revenue. Each of the above strategies can be applied independently – premium broadband experience subscriptions, blended services revenues and advertising. Combining these tools will further enhance revenue potential. A premium broadband experience can attract and retain new customers while optimizing network performance and increasing revenue per user. Combining this with blended services will attract more subscribers to both offerings. Entry-level premium broadband and blended services could be offered for near free or subsidized by advertising revenue, and then additional revenue generated from subscriber growth and higher revenue per subscriber based on upselling enhanced services.

Network transformation is the pillar that the OTT integration toolkit is built upon. It provides the foundation for a superior user experience that will differentiate a carrier’s offerings from competitors and especially differentiate it from OTT service providers.

To find out more about GENBAND, visit the company at ITEXPO East 2012. To be held Jan. 31- Feb. 3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla., ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s premier IP communications event. Dominic Walker is speaking during “Running at Near 100% Utilization – Welcome to the New World” and Jim McLaughlin is speaking during “Best Practices for Monetizing the Cloud”. For more information on ITEXPO registration, click here.

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Edited by Jennifer Russell