I can’t believe it has already been two years since I took over as CEO of GENBAND.

A lot has happened in the past 24 months and while I always try to look forward and ensure that we as a company are well positioned for the future, in this case I think it is worth a retrospective look back to acknowledge some of the milestones that my team has been instrumental in helping us achieve during this period.

Last week was one of the most amazing of my professional career.  GENBAND held our annual Perspectives customer and partner summit in Orlando and I was blown away by not only the incredible production of the event that my team executed flawlessly, but at the caliber of the speakers, presenters, media and analysts attending the conference.

It’s no secret we are in the middle of a mobile revolution. There’s a mobile app we can download to our smartphones designed to make just about any activity in our modern lives more convenient, more productive or more organized. Or more connected to our friends, family, colleagues … and the world in general!

As our team prepares for what I know will be an amazing week at Mobile World Congress, I cannot express how excited I am about all of the great things happening at GENBAND.  Not only do we have an awesome new booth design with a great location in Hall 2 of the Congress, but our sales team is ready to welcome many of our customers and partners and our executives will be sharing lots of exciting news with media and analysts throughout the show.

Today GENBAND announced it is planning to establish the world’s first neutral exchange making it possible for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to participate on a massive scale in the fast-growing multimedia messaging industry, by bringing their subscribers a more fun, more intuitive, and more powerful experience than all the “OTT” challengers put together.

Why?

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.

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.

More people with smartphones…

More Internet access points with the growth of Wi-Fi and hot spots…

More developer platforms and the rise of real-time communications APIs…

The freelance economy is the future of work, even in the traditional workplace. Getting things done, especially in the hyper-connected information age, is happening more and more remotely, and is increasingly being measured in “job units.” How productive the coming generations of workers are will likely be measured less by “punching the clock” and more by “finishing the job” – one job after the other.

Over-the-Top (OTT) service providers, like Skype, Google, WhatsApp and Netflix are riding on top of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) capex-intensive infrastructure by delivering Web and mobile competitive offers either directly (pure OTT VoIP applications) or indirectly (embedding voice, video and messaging into social, mobile, or gaming apps).