To say that the past year has been transformational in our company’s history might be an understatement. Not only did we successfully combine two long-time industry leaders into a technology powerhouse that is poised to further disrupt the telecom industry, but today we announced that we have acquired a perfectly complementary and rapidly growing company in Edgewater Networks.  The acquisition of Edgewater Networks allows us to continue to execute on our strategic objectives of broadening Ribbon’s offerings to our global customer base and expanding into new adjacent markets. 

Many of you may not have heard of Edgewater Networks, but they are one of the true gems and success stories in our industry having achieved an impressive 25 percent year over year growth rate for the past three years, with more than 635,000 actively deployed edge devices and more than 20 million connected endpoint, while boasting some of the largest service providers and enterprises in the U.S as customers.

But why is this acquisition so important to our company and our customers? First, it allows us to offer our growing global customer base a complete core-to-edge product portfolio, unrivaled end-to-end service assurance and analytics solutions, and a fully integrated SD-WAN service. It also further strengthens and enhances our current portfolio. With the ability to serve the core to the edge of the network, Ribbon is now equipped to deliver an end-to-end connection to the enterprise and provide unparalleled service assurance, security and monitoring capabilities. Our Kandy Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering is immediately enhanced with the ability to provide analytics and service assurance capabilities across the enterprise network edge. Additionally, our Microsoft Skype for Business and Teams offerings will be expanded by Edgewater Networks Intelligent Edge solutions.

This acquisition benefits Ribbon in so many ways including from an industry leadership, global reach and expansion, growth and financial perspective:

• Industry leadership – with this transaction Ribbon is projected to be #1 in the Enterprise Session Border Controller market
• Global Reach Ribbon’s global reach is expected to expand Edgewater Networks’ market opportunities outside the USA
• Expansion – This transaction expands Ribbon’s offerings for both service providers and enterprises
• Growth – This acquisition allows Ribbon to enter into the high growth SDWAN market for the small and medium enterprises
• Financial – This transaction offers meaningful projected revenue contribution to Ribbon in 2018 and is immediately accretive (Adjusted EBITDA and nonGAAP EPS) once closed.

I am so excited about what this acquisition means for our industry and our customers. It allows us to deliver expanded and comprehensive managed services offering to our service provider and enterprise customers, with complete solutions for Unified Communication (UC), UCaaS, UC Security, Policy, Analytics and SD-WAN.

As the digital economy continues to transform all of our worlds, Ribbon looks forward to continuing to be an integral part in tying it all together.

Below is a great infographic that sums up the benefits of this acquisition nicely.