Genband Goes Virtual at (Actual) Show

Networking vendor Genband Inc. may have a switch, gateway, server, controller or other piece of hardware for everything from the network core to the edge, but its future is squarely up in the cloud.

It's pretty simple for a vendor like Genband, as Ken Workun, Genband's director of solutions marketing, explains: "From a market perspective, we're being requested to provide software, not boxes. In response, we are building software, not boxes."

Genband's been moving away from its box roots to position itself as an IP transformation specialist for several years now. In fact, Joe McGarvey, Genband's director of strategic marketing, says that its session border controller (SBC) is one of the only off-the-shelf hardware products it's developed in several years.

Genband is part of the growing movement toward network functions virtualization (NFV) and software in general. In fact, Workun says that all of Genband's products will be "heavily engineered to be hardware-independent and cloud-ready."

A recent example includes its cloud-based, enterprise unified communications NUViA offering. Even the SBC, while hardware, separates the signaling and media plane, so that they can scale independently and be shared across the network resources.

"We're all over virtualization in that context," Workun says. "We are seeing it heavily requested in the signaling plane in particular."

Speaking of virtual realities, I'm in Orlando, Fla., this week for Genband's annual Perspectives conference where its customers, partners and services providers are convening to share their thoughts on making the network smarter, more robust and, you got it, more virtual.

Check back to Light Reading for the latest updates, and don't be surprised if some live reports from Disney World or a random Foreigner concert make their way in, too.

— Sarah Reedy, Senior Editor, Light Reading