While the merger of Nokia with Alcatel was probably more interesting to Wall Street, the merger of SONUS with GENBAND is an indication about what we should expect to happen at the network layer for carriers working with the Internet of Things.
Candidly, these companies and Oracle are at the heart of IP session management technology. Both companies started from the perspective of converting analog TDM voice channels into digitized packet sessions.
GENBAND announced at Mobile World Congress that it was working with AT&T, and demonstrated a handful of applications powered by AT&T’s IoT Starter Kit, applications spun up on the Kandy platform, “enhanced to deliver the ‘human element’ to IoT connectivity via contextual real-time communications solutions” and enabling “things” and “people” to actively message each other to get work done.
Blending Kandy into the diameter solutions enables the companies to aggressively chase growth markets like security, SD-WAN, and other digitally-driven communications networks made more accessible to applications and systems developers through consoles.
In effect, the strategy is to provide full stack communicationsthat migrate their products from infrastructure to infrastructure as a service and from network to network as a service. In the end, this means applications and everything else as a service, which GENBAND’s CEO David Walsh wrote about last year as “The Exchange of Everything.”
Strangely, the world has made session management essential with NFV and SDN technologies, and this trend will probably grow as software-defined perimeters grow in adoption. At the core of the merger will be session gateway technology with Diameter interfaces for better virtualization.
Diameter can be at the core of the security strategy, and recent discussion about the use of block chain for identity management and change logs indicate a great opportunity with the Internet of Things.
The IoT and IIoT companies that follow this publication intuitively understand the confluence of messaging, chat bots, and the value of using voice transcription, for example, to instruct machines and vice versa. There is so much going on by way of consumer sensations like Amazon Echo (“turn on speakers”) and enterprise solutions like enabling IBM Watson’s cognitive contact center that the inevitability of more multi-modal human and machine communications is more than certain. Much of this was demonstrated two years ago by GENBAND’s Kandy Cloud Communications platform integration of Watson.
All of this can be complimentary to the IoT radio concerns that are making companies invest in multiple solutions to ensure ubiquity. Gateways that manage sessions are going to be ever more important for scalable network deployments.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
