fring may not be the best-known over-the-top (OTT) service, but its acquisition last week by Genband is a significant move by one of the up-and-comers in what used to be thought of as the SBC (session border controller) space--a space that is rapidly evolving into a platform that bridges public and private networks and attempts to connect the myriad endpoints that users bring to their enterprise communications experience.
I had a chance to talk with David Walsh, who took over as CEO at Genband last July, about the acquisition of fring, and about the company's strategy for OTT and other elements of a broader service platform.
Some context: This past February, Genband announced a major architecture vision for a set of products and services that embrace IMS, SBCs, Unified Communications, and cloud-based services. The overarching vision is of a platform that can sit in--and also straddle--carrier and enterprise networks to support end-to-end IP communications across public and private networks. The idea is to support whatever type of client wants to join that network, rationalize the connectivity within this middle layer, and connect it optimally to whatever endpoint--or enterprise resource--the user is trying to access.
The fring acquisition represents a piece of that vision, David Walsh explained to me. The aim is to have within Genband's portfolio the ability to support the main ways by which enterprise IP endpoints will access this future network:
* Voice over LTE (for the mobile subscriber)
* IP softswitch (for the enterprise end-client user)
* WebRTC (for the Web-based user)
* OTT services (to capture traffic migrating away from carrier-provided services, especially in the mobile world)
This last piece was the one that Genband was missing and is seeking to fill with the fring acquisition, Walsh said. Genband's intended customer here is, in fact, the mobile operators--Walsh's contention is that mobile operators are in the process of letting go of the illusion that OTT will either go away or somehow be pushed out. Instead, Genband is planning to offer fring's capabilities as a white-label service that carriers can use to generate revenue--in the form of their own in-house OTT offerings.
"Our game isn’t to go out and try to beat Skype by trying to have more fring clients out there," he said. "It’s really to sell to the carriers."
Walsh pointed out that "an enormous amount of international traffic is shifting to over-the-top." He cited TeleGeography figures showing growth of international minutes from 275 billion to 500 billion between 2005 and 2012--with 150 billion of those minutes coming from OTT: "They're almost all of the growth," he said.
Walsh insists that carriers can beat competing OTT services with their own offerings because they control not only the OTT infrastructure, but also the carrier infrastructure, and so can provide a better experience. He said fring was one of the few OTT providers, along with Skype and WhatsApp, with the proven ability to scale and the broad feature/function set required for a major carrier offering.
He also said a carrier-based OTT offering can be more appealing because it offers something that standalone OTT services can't--ubiquity: "What's the fundamental weakness of an OTT offering?" he said. "It’s not ubiquitous. It's a community. Who connects communities? It's the carriers." He noted that Skype's fastest-growing type of traffic is off-net--i.e., originating on Skype and terminating on the public network.
Though terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, Walsh said that fring has 40 million users worldwide, and that $30 million-$40 million had been invested in building the company.
Conclusion
When you look at Genband and competitors like Oracle, which has acquired not only Acme Packet but various carrier-oriented software companies, you see a vision of cloud-based communications that could pose an interesting challenge to the existing enterprise-focused communications vendors: Cisco resells its communications platform to carrier partners via the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS); Microsoft is ramping up its cloud-based 365 offering to provide Lync as a service. Meanwhile, companies that started in the SBC world--as very limited protocol-translation and security devices--are trying to expand these into platforms with much deeper tentacles into the carrier networks.
This latter approach would seem to offer a more natural path to an all-IP future in which the enterprise would participate. The question is how far off that all-IP future really is, and what detours may lie on the road ahead.
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