As carriers look to compete with OTT voice and video solutions, GENBAND is helping them via their new fring Alliance Revenue Engine Apps. As a reminder, the fring Alliance is a group of carriers working collectively to, for all effective purposes, launch a cross-carrier Skype competitor. GENBAND makes it easy for operators to set up a virtually turnkey solution which allows mobile and other operators to provide an alternative OTT service.
“We’re committed to helping our CSP partners and customers alike position themselves effectively in today’s extraordinarily competitive and fast-moving market,” said Roy Timor-Rousso, General Manager, fring Alliance. “The Alliance is more than a Rich Communications Services platform that mobile operators can leverage to offer their own white-label solutions– it’s also a rapid service creation and revenue engine for differentiated, high-quality experiences users are willing to pay for.”
I met with much of the GENBAND PR and marketing team at Mobile World Congress (MWC16) and they explained their new revenue ideas with me. The meeting included Patrick Joggerst, EVP of Global Sales and Marketing and Bita Milanian SVP of marketing. The ideas include:
of contacts, calling and messaging.
Payment transfer between accounts as well as accounts to services.
Advertising which could allow a splash screen to appear when a call is made on a device.
User created content such as slide sharing and greeting cards.
Also, the company has introduced two types of apps going forward for carrier members of the alliance.
Macro apps will either be developed by or validated by the fring team – allowing carriers to quickly turn up new services to their audience.
Micro apps are developed by individual operators on the Kandy.io real time communications Platform as a Service (PaaS). The twist here is a carrier can develop their own micro-app and then market it to other alliance members if they so choose.
Included is a portal where apps can be downloaded – similar to an app store.
This is just one area where the company made news. In addition, they announced the Q50 SBC can handle a whopping 200,000 concurrent sessions. Kandy will now come with wrappers which are prepackaged apps for things like Visual Attendant, Concierge service (see graphic above), two-factor authentication and more. In addition, GENBAND’s virtualized and elastic Wireless Access Gateway evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG) and NFV Cloud Manager software will be integrated onto the HPE Helion Open Stack carrier-grade NFV platform to demonstrate LTE Wi-Fi solutions.
