The key to Kandy is going beyond traditional UC&C to a much tighter business process and applications integration through the web paradigm enabled by WebRTC.
Last Tuesday night, I attended the Genband Kandy launch event in San Francisco. It was clear from the outset that Genband is focused on positioning Kandy not only to the telecom world, but also the developer community.
The event was held at Ruby Skye, billed as "San Francisco's premiere Nightclub and Special Event Venue". No doubt that it is one of the hot club venues in SF, as the list of acts on the website and the multiple 10-foot-high speakers indicate. For this event, Genband took the entire nightclub over for the introduction of Kandy, a major effort to transform not only Genband, but the entire business of communications.
Kandy is a real time communications software development platform, based on the Genband communications platform, recent acquisitions, heavily leveraging and integrating WebRTC. Kandy is intended to help companies build communications that are more closely implemented with the way they interact with their customers and partners as well as how their employees work.
Kandy combines the simplicity of the Web, native mobile application integration, and enterprise-grade real time communications capabilities into a cloud based solution. The goal of Kandy is to enable communications applications integration. As David Walsh, Genband CEO put it, they have combined all of their capabilities to create a transformational solution.
I believe Kandy is the first platform from a major communications company to embrace the new web communications paradigm that WebRTC is enabling. Following on Genband's commitment to WebRTC and to the next generation of communications, Kandy is creating a large scale platform that is designed to enable the addition of high quality communications across a range of web and other applications.
In addition to announcing the Kandy platform at the event, Genband had a group of early adopters showing how they we reusing Kandy in their applications. In addition to some smaller new companies, large organizations like SAP are embracing Kandy. According to Nayaki Nayyar, senior vice president, Cloud for Customer Engagement, SAP.
"At SAP, we are redefining the future of customer engagement," she said. "We are leveraging Genband's Kandy to further enhance the customer experience and bring contextual unified communications to our customer engagement offering." In addition to SAP, there were Kandy demos with Atlas Communications, Tech Mahindra, Bloomfire, Infostreet, VIZICOM, and others, including some cool Genband-developed demos. The VIZICOM app that enables home care follow-ups after a hospital visit were particularly enthusiastically viewed.
Kandy's Platform-as-a-Service framework includes APIs, SDKs and quick-starts, which are pre-built applications like video shopping assistance. With Kandy there is no longer a need to leave an application to start a conversation, help a customer, get a live update or ask a question. It allows the individual to quickly see who is available to resolve an issue, or Kandy can find the right person to address the problem.
The key to Kandy is going beyond traditional UC&C to a much tighter business process and applications integration through the web paradigm enabled by WebRTC. "The Kandy Platform is designed to allow anyone, from IT to business owners, to embed real time video, voice, presence and text into their Web and mobile applications," said Paul Pluschkell, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Cloud Services for Genband. "With just a few clicks, developers can connect customers, employees and even products (IoT) into their existing or new applications. Kandy gets them to market faster and more cost effectively."
Clearly, Kandy and through it Genband, are focused on changing the game. As part of the announcement, Genband announced a sandbox for developers that is available for free developer trials at kandy.io. The developer portal includes a developer area, application showcase, and developer community, in addition to API, SDK and quick start tools
With Kandy, Genband is clearly moving in a new direction. It is entering the Enterprise market in a new way as well as moving into the voice applications spaces space currently occupied by companies like Twilio, and the WebRTC development space of CafeX and TokBox.
To their credit, Genband seems to have both a complete offer including all aspects of communications, as well as the substantial experience and product portfolio to create a transformational offer. They combine both WebRTC and SIP, as well as other products from their portfolio such as SBCs and the core call control platforms.
As we move forward into webification and the inclusion of more and more communications into applications and processes (communications-enabled business processes or CEBP), Genband and Kandy are options that companies looking to enhance their business with communications integration should consider.
