Want to see what embedded real-time communications can do for you? Now you can.  We’re bringing Kandy to the doorsteps of companies across North America.  It’s the perfect opportunity for everyone from developers to C-suite level decision makers to see what voice, video, chat, screen sharing, co-browsing and collaboration can do for their applications.

2014 was a remarkable year at GENBAND, as we continued to bring better ways of working and communicating to our growing channel partner network, who in turn leveraged our cloud (NUViA) and platform (Kandy) as well as our SIP Trunking and Application Server offerings to improve their offerings – and bottom line profits.

Have we moved on from the idea of “Unified Communications” to “Optimized Real-Time Communications?” There’s a lot of chatter going on about the death of “UC” and the rise of “RTC” for businesses, and the notion that the desktop phone and PBX as we knew them are being systematically, if slowly, decommissioned in favor of the more sophisticated mobile devices now available. But it’s not just the devices, it’s the applications including security applications, and the movement toward embedding RTC into everyday workflow and platforms, including CRM.

Change or lose. Transform and win. Transformation in the real-time communications software industry is all around us - there is software everywhere, in the network, on the edge, on devices and endpoints, in the applications and embedded in applications. Nothing is standing still, and those who develop a score for transformation will orchestrate value creation while the rest will be doomed to cacophony.

As the holidays continue, and we all rest up for the exciting year ahead, I thought we’d share the constellation we see forming here at GENBAND in the expanding universe of Real-Time Communications software and solutions. We see software everywhere, in the network, at the edge, on the device, and embedded in applications. The evolution of the communications cloud and “communications-as-a-service” is continuing to skyrocket.  Here are seven streams of predictions.

In September I released the first version of my view of the current NFV landscape and ecosystems in an attempt to visually represent the key players in this movement.  Since the release of the initial version I have received some great feedback and have decided to update it for this quarter.

Key updates to the landscape include:

While M-Commerce has been all the rage over the last ten years, “M-Customer” is a term I’m coining in this column to describe customer engagement experiences through mobile devices. The innovation here has just begun and is closely linked to M-Commerce but pertains as much to customer retention and loyalty as it does to making the initial sale.

Earlier this year, I was blessed to be introduced to Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer of Samsung, when he delivered a keynote address at GENBAND’s Perspectives14 customer and partner summit in Orlando. I was drawn in to his vision for wellness enabled by such innovations as Samsung’s Gear Fit device, and Life Fit application embedded into the Galaxy S4.

Today at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress, there has been significant discussion and debate around Open Source and ecosystems. Why do we need Open Source movements and communities such as OpenFlow, OpenStack, OpenPlatformNFV? Why are ecosystems such as HP OpenNFV, Intel Network Builders and Alcatel Lucent Cloudband important?

I am attending the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in Dusseldorf this week and the event kicked off with the Open Network Foundation/Software Defined Networking (ONF/SDN) Workshop chaired by Marc Cohn of ONF/Ciena for an exciting week of the latest on SDN, NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and Open Networking.