Ribbon Communications Inc. provides communications technology to service providers and enterprises globally.
The company provides a broad range of software and high-performance hardware products, network solutions, and services that enable the secure delivery of data and voice communications, and high-bandwidth networking and connectivity for residential consumers, and for small, medium, and large enterprises, and industry verticals, such as finance, education, government, utilities, and transp...
Ribbon Communications Inc. provides communications technology to service providers and enterprises globally.
The company provides a broad range of software and high-performance hardware products, network solutions, and services that enable the secure delivery of data and voice communications, and high-bandwidth networking and connectivity for residential consumers, and for small, medium, and large enterprises, and industry verticals, such as finance, education, government, utilities, and transportation. The company has a global presence, with research and development, or sales and support locations in over 30 countries around the world.
Strategy
The company is implementing a focused strategy to target its broad global base of service provider and enterprise customers to establish itself as a key supplier of networking solutions. Key elements of the company’s strategy are cross-selling and tier one service provider growth; North American IP optical networks market share; participation in the 5G opportunity; software-centric and cloud-native offerings; enterprise offerings; and partnerships.
Customers
The company’s customers consist of a diverse set of service providers and enterprises located in over 140 countries around the world. Service provider customers include telephone companies (‘telcos’) offering fixed and wireless communications services, cable Multi-System Operators (‘MSOs’), and Communications as a Service providers. The company’s service provider customers include many of the largest CSPs globally. Enterprise customers include small, medium, and large businesses, and industry verticals, such as transportation, utilities, government/public sector, finance, and education.
In the year ended December 31, 2024, Verizon Communications Inc. (‘Verizon’) accounted for approximately 14% of its revenue. Verizon is a service provider that offers interconnect, fixed line, and mobile communications services, and the company’s software solutions are sold across their business divisions supporting their large enterprises, SMB, and consumer telecommunications and cable-related offerings. The company’s top five customers represented approximately 34% of its revenue in the year ended December 31, 2024.
Segment Information
The company operates through two separate lines: the Cloud and Edge segment (‘Cloud and Edge’) and the IP Optical Networks segment (‘IP Optical Networks’).
Cloud and Edge Business Segment
The Cloud and Edge segment provides secure and reliable software and hardware products, solutions, and services for VoIP communications, Voice Over LTE (‘VoLTE’), and Voice Over 5G (‘VoNR’) communications, as well as UC&C services to both service provider and enterprise customers. The company’s Cloud and Edge products are increasingly software-centric and cloud-native for deployment on private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructures, in data centers, on enterprise premises, and within service provider private networks.
Cloud and Edge Products and Solutions
The company’s Cloud and Edge portfolio delivers multiple solutions for enabling VoIP, VoLTE, VoNR, and UC&C in network, on-premises, or via the Telco Cloud for a broad range of service provider and enterprise customers. The solutions provided with this portfolio include those for:
Securing and providing resilient connectivity and calling via direct routing for Operator Connect, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other cloud-based UC&C applications.
Securing contact center applications.
Securing service provider hosted and managed unified communications (‘UC’) services.
Securing network interconnects for communications services.
Network transformation of fixed service provider voice services networks to help evolve, consolidate, and modernize legacy networks to VoIP, and onto virtualized network environments or the Telco Cloud.
Implementing IP Multimedia Subsystem (‘IMS’) networks required by mobile service providers for VoLTE service deployments and for 5G voice services.
Modernizing, evolving, and securing enterprise and industry vertical UC environments, supporting both on-premises and cloud-based deployments.
Securing voice sessions and protecting VoIP communications connectivity infrastructures, contact centers, Private Branch Exchanges, and media servers.
Providing identity assurance that helps mitigate robocalls, prevent fraud by determining phone caller identity, intent, and reputation.
Analytics to provide visibility, security, and service assurance to enhance communication network operations and customer experiences.
The company’s Cloud and Edge market-leading product portfolio consists of two main categories – Session Border Controller (‘SBC’) products and Network Transformation products:
The company’s SBC product portfolio encompasses a full range of deployment platforms, including:
High-performance carrier-grade compute platforms leveraging the latest advancements in silicon, including NVIDIA GPU processors.
Feature-rich virtualized and cloud-native software products for deployment in both private and public cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (‘AWS’), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Fully cloud-native implementation supporting as-a-Service (‘aaS’) offers and business models.
On-premises dedicated appliances that scale up and down to meet the most demanding performance and security requirements.
The company’s SBC portfolio consists of the following categories of products:
Core network SBCs that are deployable by customers in their core networks, or on private or public clouds, and used to identify, manage, and protect voice communications traffic as it moves through and between communication networks. SBCs secure and interwork different voice communications protocols at IP network boundaries, both within and between service provider and enterprise networks. The portfolio also includes Policy and Routing products that work in heterogeneous voice networks and are used to intelligently manage communications sessions based on multiple policies, such as least cost and Quality of Service routing, media type, source or destination, and time of day or week.
Enterprise Session Border Controllers and Edge products, deployable on premises or in the cloud, to enable the deployment and migration to secure cloud-based UC&C applications, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom Phone, and service provider UC&C offerings, as well as securing cloud contact center offerings. Enterprise SBCs provide service assurance and visibility within the enterprise for service-provider hosted and managed UC services. The EdgeMarc multi-service gateway portfolio provides support for enterprise voice interfaces, such as PRI, T1, and FXO, as well as aggregation and transport of local data traffic. The company’s products are also provided as-a-service through its Ribbon Connect for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing platform, a cloud-based aaS offering for securing calls to the public telephone network from the enterprise.
Ribbon Call Trust is an aaS offering for providing identity assurance. The identity assurance portfolio, using information from deployed network elements, including SBCs, helps mitigate robocalls and prevent fraud by determining phone caller identity, intent, and reputation. With this information, it is possible to help determine if a call is from a legitimate person, for a legitimate purpose, and without malicious intent. The company’s customers utilize these capabilities to provide a better call experience to their end-customers. The company is an industry leader in the development and deployment of the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENS) standards, with deployments throughout North America and Europe.
A cloud-native Analytics Platform with applications that aid customers in gathering actionable intelligence from their communications network elements, including SBCs in the core and edge of their networks, to provide them with network performance visibility, service assurance, security, and fraud mitigation.
The company’s Network Transformation product portfolio is deployed in the most demanding environments and enables the modernization of fixed, mobile, and enterprise voice communications networks to support network and Telco Cloud-based services and the next generation of IP-based voice communications services, and includes multiple software-centric platforms and products, including:
Signaling products that provide network signaling for communications services.
Call Controllers that provide call processing within networks for voice communications services and applications.
Media Gateways that perform the interworking or translation of media, or voice sessions and the corresponding network protocols both within and across VoIP and legacy communications networks, and use codecs (coder-decoder) and digital signal processors to do so.
A multi-tenant and highly scalable Application Server that enables the deployment of VoIP and UC&C services and applications.
IP Optical Networks Business Segment
The company’s IP Optical Networks segment provides high-performance, secure, and reliable hardware and software products and solutions for IP networking, switching, and routing, and optical transport. This portfolio is offered to service provider, enterprise, and industry verticals with critical transport network infrastructures, including utilities, government, defense, transportation, and education and research.
IP Optical Networks Products and Solutions
The company’s IP Optical Networks portfolio delivers multiple solutions spanning access, metro, regional, and long-haul geographies, and using ring, mesh, and point-to-point topologies. MPLS and other protocols provide a broad range of networking services for its customers. The company’s solutions for optical and IP transport and networking include 5G-native solutions for mobile-backhaul, metro and edge aggregation, core networking, data center interconnect, multi-service access, and transport solutions for wholesale carriers. High availability and security also make the solutions ideal for critical infrastructure delivering mission-critical services.
The company’s IP Optical Networks multi-layer product portfolio includes:
The Apollo product line provides programmable and open Optical Transport Network (‘OTN’) capabilities over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (‘DWDM’) support. The OTN layer maps Ethernet and other services into OTN bit streams for transparent optical transmission, and DWDM routes wavelengths of light containing the OTN-encapsulated bit streams across wide areas, greatly increasing the efficiency and capacity of fiber facilities. The company’s Apollo hardware and software products deliver reconfigurable and programmable low-latency optical transport that simultaneously speeds up provisioning of new services while maximizing traffic throughput at the lowest cost per bit. Apollo provides customers with a choice of two transmission optimizations. Capacity-reach optimization uses industry-leading 5nm-140Gbaud technology that maximizes channel capacity for any given distance. It supports optical transmission speeds ranging from 400 gigabits per second for ultra-long haul applications to 1.2 terabits per second for short haul applications. Power-cost optimization uses low power consumption and cost-effective 400 gigabit per second technology, which delivers strong enough performance for metro applications. The Apollo product line provides state-of-the-art transparent and flexible DWDM and OTN transport with integrated packet switching capabilities. A modular architecture allows optimized solutions across access, metro, regional, and long-haul networks. Apollo combines high performance, low-latency OTN transport, and OTN switching with software-configurable optical routing for maximum efficiency. Apollo can dynamically reconfigure optimal links in the event of fiber failures to maintain service availability. Apollo is ‘self-aware,’ with intelligent reporting for efficient and SDN-ready operations. Apollo also provides deployment choice, whether as an integrated solution or as standalone subsystems for disaggregated open architecture multivendor solutions. A key security feature of Apollo that is used broadly in critical infrastructure and enterprise deployments is Layer 1 Optical Encryption. This uses AES-256 encryption, which is the strongest and most robust encryption standard that is commercially available today, and also supports a choice of standard, Post Quantum Computing, and Quantum Key Distribution key exchange mechanisms.
The Neptune product line of high-performance switching and routing solutions is optimized to provide the converged multi-service, service-aware aggregation needed for cost/performance optimized connectivity between consumers and the applications and services they are using. Neptune supports multiple services delivered over multiple access network technologies. Ethernet interfaces ranging from Gigabit Ethernet (‘GbE’) through to 100GbE allow all IP/MPLS and Ethernet access networks to be supported, and pluggables providing XGS-PON, EPON, and TDM circuit emulation allow PON access networks and legacy TDM access networks to be supported. Traffic from the access networks is aggregated and connected to the services, applications, and compute platforms, meeting the specific service level agreements required for each service, including guaranteed latency, jitter, capacity, or reliability. To achieve this, Neptune uses a range of protocols, such as IP/MPLS, MPLS-TP, and segment routing traffic engineered (‘SR-TE’). As services, applications, and compute platforms become increasingly distributed across the network, located in local data centers and multi-access Edge compute platforms, Neptune, in conjunction with MUSE, can dynamically route the connectivity wherever it is required, whilst still meeting the performance requirements. In addition, Neptune provides a 400G ZR+ pluggable capability, allowing it to support both single layer IP over DWDM connectivity or multi-layer optimized IPoOTN/DWDM connectivity, whichever best meets the network operator’s needs. With these capabilities, Neptune is ideally suited for residential broadband backhaul, business services, MSOs, and private enterprise networks. With Flexible Ethernet, enhanced timing and synchronization capabilities, 25GbE and 50GbE interfaces, and high-capacity, high-density platforms, Neptune is also ideal for 5G deployments. These capabilities and unique form factors, such as DIN-rail mounting, street cabinet deployment, and environmental capabilities, also make Neptune a compelling solution for mission-critical enterprises.
The Muse SDN multi-layer Domain Orchestrator and cognitive software is a suite of cloud-native applications that deliver SDN domain orchestration for underlying multi-layer Neptune IP and Apollo Optical networks. This covers complete lifecycle management and automation to speed up time to revenue, reduce total cost of ownership, and facilitate integration into wider ecosystems. It is powered by a carrier-grade, cloud-native Platform as a Service and works in conjunction with its LightSOFT network management system. Built for a 5G services world, Muse enables network operators to programmatically configure and combine hard and soft slicing technologies to create slices appropriate to different sets of 5G-enabled services and customer sub-networks. Then, using a rich set of tools, operators can design, provision, and assure a broad array of services on top of the slices. Muse’s suite of advanced service and network control applications empower service providers to do more, through simple service creation and lifecycle management, proactive network assurance, network optimization, and automation. Muse ensures that people and systems receive the right tools to monetize the network effectively through intuitive graphical user interfaces or industry-standard Application Programmable Interfaces.
Services and Support
The company provides service-based solutions to complement its products and to help service providers and enterprises grow revenues, serve their customers, reduce costs, and improve productivity. The company’s Global Services organization provides a wide range of services to enable its customers to achieve those goals. The company’s Professional Services team includes hundreds of VoIP, IMS, IP, and Optical networking specialists offering technical depth, network breadth, and proprietary tools to assist customers in all aspects of network modernization, design, operation, and deployment. The company’s Maintenance Support offerings deliver a comprehensive support strategy for all of its products, applications, and solutions sold. The company’s Managed Services offer proactive monitoring to keep customers’ production communications running smoothly so they can concentrate on operating their business. In addition, the company’s Education Services are designed to equip customers with the technical knowledge and skills needed to accelerate service readiness and delivery goals, and to help customers get the most out of its products and solutions.
Sales and Marketing
The company sells its portfolio of products and solutions to service provider and enterprise customers around the globe through both direct sales and indirectly through channel partners, including independent resellers, distributors, service providers, and system integrators. Most of the company’s sales to service providers are done directly, and most sales to enterprises are done through channel partners. To support the company’s customers’ requirements, its direct sales team is organized geographically and by major customers. The company’s sales teams sell its full portfolio of products and solutions from both segments to customers in each salesperson’s assigned region. The company’s direct sales teams and resellers are supported by a highly trained technical sales engineering staff who work closely with its customers to develop technical proposals and design systems to optimize system performance and economic benefits for its customers.
The company’s marketing organization is responsible for building awareness of its brand in the markets served and driving engagement with its strategies, solutions, and products. It promotes its brand and portfolio value propositions to key stakeholders, including its customers, channel partners, and prospects globally. The organization develops all of its corporate and portfolio messaging for different target audiences, and manages all customer and industry communication channels, including public relations, digital content (including for the web and social media), events, and trade shows, as well as demand generation and account-based marketing campaigns in conjunction with its sales force.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 787 issued patents in the U.S., 659 of which expire between 2025 and 2042, and it had 41 in-process patent applications in the U.S. As of December 31, 2024, the company also had 351 issued patents in foreign jurisdictions, and it had 86 in-process patent applications in foreign jurisdictions. As of December 31, 2024, the company had 30 trademarks registered or pending in the U.S., and 174 trademarks registered or pending in foreign jurisdictions.
Regulatory Considerations
As a company with global operations, the company is subject to complex U.S. and foreign laws and regulations, including trade regulations, tariffs, import and export regulations, anti-bribery and corruption laws, antitrust or competition laws, cybersecurity, privacy, and data protection, among others. In addition, the company’s operations are also subject to a number of environmental regulations, such as the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (‘WEEE’) and the Directive on the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (‘RoHS’).
Seasonality
The company has experienced quarterly fluctuations in customer activity due to seasonal considerations. The company typically experiences increases in order volume in the fourth quarter due to greater spending on operating and capital expenditures by its service provider customers. The company typically experiences reductions in order volume toward the beginning of the calendar year (year ended December 31, 2024), when its service provider customers are operationalizing their annual budgets and plans.
History
The company was founded in 1997. It was incorporated in 2017. The company was formerly known as Sonus Networks, Inc. and changed its name to Ribbon Communications Inc. in 2017.
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