Genband has has grown dramatically with a CAGR of 130% driven by key acquisitions -- including Tekelec's switching division (2007), Nextpoint, (2008) and the Nortel CVAS assets in June 2010
Last week, Genband had its analyst conference with sessions designed for press, industry analysts and financial analysts. Company executives reported on momentum over the last decade, progress with the acquisition on Nortel assets, gave insights on industry trends and provided a portfolio and services review.
Looking at its progress since 1999 when it was then General Bandwidth, Genband has not only changed its name but has grown dramatically with a CAGR of 130% driven by key acquisitions — including Tekelec’s switching division (2007), Nextpoint, (2008) and the Nortel CVAS (carrier VoIP and application solutions) assets in June 2010. Genband has shipped over 200 million IP ports across its history.
In the case of Nortel, Genband swallowed up a company that was about four times its size. Last year, the privately held company had about $700 million in sales. Genband execs are pleased with their progress on combining their business with Nortel CVAS: they have secured 99% of offered former Nortel employees, rationalized the combined product portfolios and multiple facilities held, and believe they have achieved a solid “culture alignment.”
As for trends, in many ways the conference was a reality check on the progress of VoIP in carrier networks. Now that it owns Nortel’s legacy voice switching products like the DMS-100), Genband reports that among its 70-plus tier one carriers , less that 10% of Class 5 switches have been replaced with IP substitutes; however about 50% of Class 4 voice switches are now using IP voice switching.
One of Genband’s CLEC customers commented that 80% of its traffic is IP-based, while another CLEC countered that 40% of its new business customers are still using an ISDN (T-1) PRI. Genband remains bullish in IP-Multimedia Subsystem as an architecture that will ultimately solve many issues with the wide range of IP applications, users and devices.
