Genband completes Nortel CVAS deal; readies exec, road map reveal

Genband took the next step in its acquisition of Nortel’s voice over IP business Friday, formally completing the acquisition and lining up endorsements from key former Nortel customers – including AT&T and Verizon – that they’ll need to sell on their vision of an end-to-end IP product portfolio.

The steps announced Friday were relatively minor: announcing employment deals with former Nortel employees (swelling Genband’s ranks from 500 to more than 3000 employees); ensuring customer and supplier contracts; and detailing the consolidation of some offices, most notably Nortel’s Richardson, Texas, digs into Genband’s Plano headquarters.

Those moves represent important behind-the-scenes progress by Genband in just a couple of whirlwind months since it announced winning Nortel’s CVAS assets with its staking horse auction bid.

Genband plans to quickly follow-up today’s news with further details on its new, combined executive team and reporting structure, expected to come out of an all-hands meeting next Tuesday, following the weekend holiday here in the U.S.

Several weeks later, a full product road map – including a big-picture IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) product strategy that represents the real technology key to the acquisition – will be laid out in full, said Mehmet Balos, Genband chief marketing officer, in an interview today.

“One of the things we’ve done since the announcement is visited all our key customers around the globe and we’re getting unbelievable support for this transaction,” Balos said. Indeed, Friday’s simple announcement included supporting quotes from telco big-wigs including Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology, and Tim Harden, AT& president of supply chain and fleet operations, two executives who don’t lend their names lightly.

At a big-picture level, Genband’s Nortel asset acquisition combines its media, session and security gateways with Nortel’s VoIP softswitch and application platform technology. Even with Nortel’s troubles, the vendor’s share of the global softswitch continued to grow, with Infonetics giving it a 70% revenue share of the North American softswitch market for Q4 2009. Together, the vendors claim to have products deployed at more than two-thirds of the world’s largest service providers, spanning 46 countries.

In addition to pitching service providers on a vision of more end-to-end VoIP and IMS-based architecture from Genband, the vendor picks up the responsibility for (and revenue of) Nortel’s legacy DMS voice switch service contracts, as well as the opportunity to migrate those TDM customers to next-generation IP/IMS architectures. “With the DMS we have now have one of the two leading [switching] platforms in North America. That’s a lot of services-related revenue and we’ll continue to support those customers while helping them migrate their networks,” Balos said.

Perhaps more challenging will be navigating the altered partner/compete vendor landscape, in which Genband will have to more directly compete with larger, more established vendors for end-to-end IP infrastructure deals. Today, Genband partners with many of those same vendors, including with Alcatel-Lucent on wireless media gateways; with Nokia Siemens Networks on trunk media gateways; and Ericsson on femtocell integration opportunities, Balos said. “I can’t speculate on what will happen in the future, but we’ve proven to be a good partner with best of breed products,” he said.

Genband will remain headquartered in the Dallas area, with strategic product and support facilities in Ottawa, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Maidenhead, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as strategic partners in India and Turkey, Balos said.