Securing the borders around our country or opening them up is a divisive subject these days and a discussion best left out of these circles. However, the need to keep foreigners out of the borders of our networks is something we can all agree on. And as networks become more complex, and the applications and data they harbor more valuable, solutions for keeping bad actors out need to become much more sophisticated.
Ribbon, through its Sonus heritage has long been a leader in session control and securing networks. It got even more of a boost in market share over the last few years after Oracle acquired Acme Packet and many service providers and enterprises started looking around for alternatives.
Session Border Controllers perform a lot of functions including session management, interoperability, media replication, reporting, and of course security functions. It’s where the original name came from: controlling sessions between the borders of un-trusted networks.
Through its comprehensive Ribbon Protect platform, Ribbon offers a number of applications designed to provide end-to-end threat detection and fraud management including protection against things like denial of service attacks, toll fraud and robocalls. It utilizes machine learning which is the only practical solution to keep up with the bad actors.
Looking to build out its portfolio of session border controllers, Ribbon recently announced its intention to acquire Edgewater Networks. While Ribbon SBCs were typically deployed in large enterprise and service provider environments, Edgewater targeted the SME market and has over 635,000 actively deployed devices and 20,000,000 connected endpoints, giving them the number one market share for the SME SBC market.
I recently had a chat with Patrick Joggerst, CMO and EVP of Business Development for Ribbon about the pending acquisition.
Bringing Edgewater into the Ribbon family makes Ribbon the world’s largest provider of SBCs. Ribbon can now protect networks from the core all the way to the edge.
In order for Ribbon Protect to work like it should, it needs to be a two-way street. Ribbon Protect pushes policy data into the network yet it needs to gather information from what is happening at the edge of the network. Now with Edgewater sitting at the edge (no pun intended), with the rich set of analytics it gathers, Ribbon Protect has that capability.
Yet Edgewater provides much more than edge border protection and analytics, it also provides SD-WAN functionality, rapidly being adopted in the enterprise and increasingly in growing demand in the SME. This is supported as a virtual machine without a hardware device required to deliver quality of service for applications such as SaaS applications and video increasingly in use in small and medium businesses.
SD-WAN is yet another offering to layer on to the already rich Kandy CPaaS offering.
According to Patrick, Edgewater has been growing at 25% per year, albeit only in North America whereas Ribbon has channels globally. Leveraging each other’s channels will further open the addressable market for the entire portfolio. Patrick says that some market analysis has already been done to test the appetite for Edgewater in Europe and results were positive.
The Edgewater acquisition makes sense for Ribbon. There is not a lot of overlap in the portfolio, it is complimentary more than anything. However, I had to ask the question if this rounds it out or if further acquisitions are on the horizon.
Of course, I much expected Patrick would say there is more coming: “We see ourselves as a consolidator in the industry overall. We are always actively looking for anything that is real-time communications, cloud-based and that we can offer as a service model in particular”.
Sounds like a well thought out strategy.
Consolidation in the business communications market will continue to happen, as it should. The winners will be those that can architect the M&As like one would architect a well-designed network. In this case I think Ribbon got it right.
