Genband Poised to Disrupt UCC Market with Kandy

By Jim Lundy

Mobile World Congress is happening this week and there is news on many fronts. A funny thing happened on the way to MCW15. Mobile collaboration took off and as a result, this year many collaboration and UC providers showed up, including Cisco, Genband, Microsoft, and Unify, just to name a few.

Genband has been coming up a lot lately in the press and part of that reason is due to their new division, which is really a startup inside the firm. The name of that startup is Kandy. This blog post is about the rise of Kandy and its role in Unified Communications and Collaboration, also known as UCC.

Genband’s Secret Weapon

Kandy is led by Veteran Silicon Valley Executive Paul Pluschkell, who fresh from the sale of his recent venture, Spigit, dove in with both feet to make Kandy a reality.

It started last June at Genband’s annual customer event, and continued with their launch in Silicon Valley last September. Kandy has quickly emerged as one of the go-to PaaS platforms for real-time communications and collaboration.

Kandy, Enabling Real-time, Mobile Collaboration Applications

Kandy takes all the real-time capabilities you want to use, such as presence, chat, voice, and video, and allows them to be integrated with legacy applications to bring them to life. Embedding real-time capabilities is hard to do, but it has gotten easier since the launch of Kandy. What it is all about is making real-time collaboration more contextual.

Genband, Kandy, and Mobile Apps

Aragon Lead Analyst David Mario Smith blogged about mobile collaboration this week. There are many new entrants, but most still offer a standalone experience. Mobile is the battle cry, but what users want is a contextual experience.

One of the reasons Kandy and Genband are poised to disrupt is that their platform can be used to create new mobile spps that work with existing processes and back-end services. This is what mobile-first is all about and this is why we think Genband is poised to disrupt the UCC market—courtesy of their new, not-so-secret weapon called Kandy.