GENBAND Targets Advanced Applications with BayPackets Buy

GENBAND Inc. has a new acquisition under its belt that brings enhanced messaging and multimedia application products to its portfolio. The company today announced it has closed an all-equity deal to buy BayPackets Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

GENBAND says the move is intended to strengthen its position as a strategic supplier of IP-based application and infrastructure solutions for VoIP and IMS networks worldwide.

The deal closed last Friday, and GENBAND already has begun work to integrate the two companies, which combined employ about 200 people, says Frederick Reynolds, senior director of marketing. While most of the top executives at the Fremont, Calif.-based applications server vendor left following the acquisition, BayPackets’s CTO and founder, Sanjeev Chawla, now occupies the CTO post at GENBAND. Chawla replaces Don Sparks, who is moving into the position of vice president of product management and architecture. In addition, Alex Guira, an existing BayPackets’ board member, will join GENBAND’s board of directors. Offices of the newly combined company include GENBAND’s existing headquarters in Plano, Texas, and offices in Austin, Texas, as well as the former BayPackets offices in Fremont, and New Delhi, India.

GENBAND has renamed BayPacket’s Agility products, which now are known as the M5 Multimedia Applications Server, and it already is marketing the product. The M5 platform supports residential and business applications including unified communications, prepaid, advanced toll-free, global voice VPNs and fixed mobile convergence. IMS-compliant multimedia applications such as multimedia ringback tones, multiplayer gaming, video mail and multimedia conferencing also can run on the server. The M5 allows for signaling and services across TDM and VoIP networks, providing interfaces for SIP, MGCP, AIN, INAP and CAMEL, and is pre-integrated with popular Call Session Control Function (CSCF) and Home Subscriber Server (HSS) products.

The M5 also includes service creation functionality, supporting SIP Servlets, JAIN, Parlay and more. It also has some OSS capabilities, providing rating, charging and messaging frameworks to work with back-office systems.

The former BayPackets application server already is in use at a respectable number of top-drawer service providers around the world, including Deutsche Telekom, which uses it for business VoIP; SBC Communications Inc., which uses it for unified messaging; and Softbank Broadband of Japan, which uses it for VoIP prepaid services, says Jody Bennett, GENBAND’s vice president of marketing. Part of the key to BayPackets’ success with these major accounts is attributable to the company’s strong channel partners, which include General Dynamics, which is the largest systems integrator for the federal government, IBM Corp. and others.

GENBAND has an existing application server, the S4 Telephony Applications Server, but that product is focused on voice applications, says Bennett, whereas the former BayPackets product addresses enhanced messaging and multimedia applications for wireline, cable and wireless service providers. GENBAND’s other products, all of which are IMS-based, include the G6 Universal Media Gateway and the C2 Signaling Gateway Controller.

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