Ribbon Boosts SD-WAN And UCaaS Offerings With $110M Acquisition Of Edgewater Networks

Ribbon Communications will leverage its $110 million acquisition of Edgewater Networks to create a complete core-to-edge portfolio as well as a fully integrated software-defined WAN service.

"The combination of Ribbon Communications and Edgewater Networks creates a best-in-breed, complete platform that extends our leadership position in the SBC (Session Border Controllers), cloud unified communication, security and analytics markets," said Fritz Hobbs, President and CEO of Westford, Mass.-based Ribbon, in a statement.

Cloud communications specialist Ribbon said it will leverage Edgewater's portfolio to enhance multiple offerings including its Kandy Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solution. Edgewater will provide Kandy with new capabilities around analytics and service assurance across the network edge.

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Edgewater, which generated $64 million in revenues in 2017, also owns a SD-WAN service that Ribbon plans to integrate to give customers a new, complete solution for the small and medium enterprise market. Additionally, Ribbon's Microsoft's Skype for Business and Teams offerings will be expanded by Edgewater's intelligent edge solutions.

Ribbon's Kevin Riley, CTO and executive vice president of Advanced R&D, said the new joint solutions will address the enterprise market and give channel partners "a comprehensive product line and support organization to deliver services to the rapidly expanding unified communications market."

San Jose, Calif.-based Edgewater has more than 635,000 edge devices in production and more than 20 million connected endpoints. The voice, video and data services specialist's flagship product is the Network Edge Orchestration platform that combines Edgewater's cloud-based service control center and intelligent edge solutions together targeting the small and medium enterprise (SME) market.

Edgewater CEO David Norman said in a statement that the technology synergies between the two vendors will enable better global customer services and accelerate innovation in the SD-WAN markets.

Founded in 1997, Ribbon provides cloud-based unified communications architectures to customer in more than 25 countries.

The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018.