GenBand Shrinks Name, Expands Portfolio, Makes First Advance into IMS

2005 was a banner year for General Bandwidth. With $20 million in revenue, the media gateway company saw 180 percent customer growth, 300 percent bookings growth, 260 percent revenue growth and 325 percent port shipment growth.

Now the company is trying to keep that momentum going with a significant expansion of its product line that embraces IMS. It also plans to try to acquire other companies to expand its IMS strategy.

The company also has changed its name from General Bandwidth to GenBand and is moving to larger corporate headquarters in the Dallas/Ft. Worth suburbs, where it will house its growing roster of personnel.

In addition to GenBand’s existing G6 Universal Media Gateway, the company’s IMS-compliant product line now consists of the new S4 Applications Server and C2 Signaling Controller. The S4 supports Class 5 services; enhanced VoIP for residential and small business; and SIP, MGCP and NCS signaling. The C2 combines the functions of a media gateway controller, an integrated signaling gateway, and a SIP-to-PSTN gateway.

The SIP-to-SS7 connectivity via the C2 can result in significant savings for service providers that would otherwise require PRIs to do SIP-to-PRI signaling, said Jody Bennett, vice president of marketing.

The new products, announced today, began shipping to the first trial customer, a CLEC, last month. General availability is slated for May.

“We’re really more than just a gateway company now,” said Frederick Reynolds, the new senior director of marketing at GenBand. “We’ve always had a market-leading gateway that does a lot of applications and can do a lot of different things for service providers. But, at the same time, now we have two new products that can be sold on their own or can be sold all together.”

Reynolds emphasizes openness – meaning the ability to interoperate with other vendors’ equipment – remains a key focus at GenBand, and is a central promise of IMS technology, which the industry has embraced and now is starting to deploy.

Yet Reynolds and Bennett said that while the company has won a lot of G6 business from Tier 1, 2 and 3 service providers including telcos and cable companies, in many cases customers’ media gateway buying decisions are tied to other VoIP solutions, like applications servers and signaling. So GenBand decided to expand its product line to address that market reality and attempt to up its per-customer revenue.

Infonetics Research last year reported that General Bandwidth was No. 2 in North America in terms of shipments for DS0 mid-to-low-density trunking media gateway solutions, second only to Cisco Systems Inc.

“We’re taking market share away from Cisco, and in a quarter or two we should be able to take the lead in that area,” said Bennett.

GenBand expects the new products – which can be used in a wide variety of wireline, cable and wireless applications that are either straight IP or leverage circuit switches – to help it push to the front.

“Truly, we believe these [products] will be market-disruptive given the products that are available today,” said Bennett. “Really, if you look at the companies that are out there today, there’s not a private company that has call control and media gateway products in their portfolio. These are products we did R&D for and we have total control of. The only other vendors that have that are the tier 1s, so it’s a very unique advantage.”

In 2005, General Bandwidth quietly acquired softswitch and signaling technology from an undisclosed company and invested several million dollars in R&D to make it carrier-grade and bring down costs, said Bennett. The company ported the technology from a Sun to a carrier-grade Linux platform.

“If you go down a Sun path, a lot of the first-generation softswich technologies are Sun based, and that carries a very expensive price tag for some of the software stacks and databases, etc.,” said Bennett. “So we ported it to carrier-grade Linux, we integrated the SS7, made significant decreases in cost and significant increases in reliability for the product.”

GenBand is expanding its R&D efforts, both in terms of research dollars and personnel. The company’s new 20,000-foot corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas – far larger than its 3,000-square foot Richardson location that originally housed a group of five – will be the base for 30 sales, marketing, financial and R&D employees initially, growing quickly to 40 employees, said Reynolds. Additionally, GenBand has R&D facilities in Austin and Brazil.

This growing company now has about 80 service provider customers across North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Last year alone its equipment went into about 150 central offices at SBC, and it will go into 400 COs at the new AT&T this year.

Meanwhile, cable TV company Videotron, one of GenBand’s recently announced customers, is putting 5,000 to 6,000 subscribers a week onto the vendor’s gear and is up to163,000 subscribers on the G6.

“We’re really starting to see our cable efforts pay off,” said Bennett.

With a “fantastic” 2005 under its belt, Bennett said the renamed company expects more of the same this year.

“Our visibility into 2006, it looks like we’re going to double our business again this year,” he said.

GenBand    www.genband.com

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines