ADTRAN Adds to its UC Capabilities

Once again, the ADTRAN folks treated analysts to their southern hospitality in Huntsville, AL last week at the ADTRAN Connect event. While primarily a networking vendor focused on carriers and service providers, a small part of the company’s business is focused on enterprise solutions and unified communications. Two years ago, the company acquired ObjectWorld, and now offers a family of UC solutions for SMBs. The company has made a good deal of progress in the past two years, adding new capabilities to enhance its UC offerings.

The enterprise business still represents a very small part of ADTRAN’s business. As Gary Bolton, vice president of global marketing pointed out, third quarter 2011 revenues were $192 million (its sixth consecutive record quarter), with 90% of that revenue coming from broadband access, internetworking and optical access.

He mentioned that for the enterprise, ADTRAN is focused on cloud connectivity, enterprise communications, and virtual mobility. Cloud connectivity enables business to connect to the outside world, using a public or private cloud. Bolton stated that ADTRAN is leveraging its leadership in IP business gateways, access routers, and Ethernet switches and is getting more traction with its existing Tier 1 customers selling hosted services.

For enterprise communications, ADTRAN offers “Solutions that provide efficient communications and communication-enabled business processes that allow businesses to become more capable and efficient.” Offerings include premise-based IP communications (NetVanta 7000 series integrated IP PBX switch and router for up to 100 users), unified communications, LAN and wireless LAN infrastructure, and audio and video endpoints (based on an OEM partnership with Polycom to sell Polycom solutions and provision their SIP phones and video endpoints). The UC offerings include:

• NetVanta Business Communications Server (for 10-100 users), which bundles the NetVanta 7000 with the NetVanta Unified Communications software;
  
  
• NetVanta Enterprise Communication Server (for 75-2000 users);
  
  
• NetVanta Unified Communications Server (UC for third-party PBXs); and
  
  
• Business Application Server (adding CEBP capabilities).

NetVanta UC capabilities include audio conferencing, unified messaging, IM/presence, click to dial, desktop client, Inbound IVR, outbound notifications, text-to-speech, paging and alerting, call redirection, database integration, personal call control, and consolidated administration. One of ADTRAN’s strengths is its “Blend and Extend” philosophy, whereby the UC software acts as a PBX adjunct on the existing PBX, enabling customers to add the UC capabilities to their existing PBXs and get basic UC functionality at a reasonable price.

One of the new capabilities discussed is the addition of presence and IM to the desktop client. At a previous analyst conference, I gave ADTRAN a hard time about claiming to be a UC vendor but not offering IM and presence capabilities. The company heard me and the other analysts loud and clear, and added these capabilities in the past year. Its desktop client, ucCompanion, is a plug-in to MS Outlook that can be launched from within Outlook, providing a graphical interface for users to control calls at their extension and to see the real-time status of others in their organization, offering centralized presence and IM, and Active Directory integration. Senior Product Manager Jeff Wissing pointed out that there’s a tight integration between the UC server software and the NetVanta 7000 series for IM and presence so that the system can provide not only IM presence status, but also telephony presence. Distributed 7000 switches can federate to enable users to see the presence status of people on other switches (telephony presence is not available for third-party PBXs). One thing that is missing is call control, which means that users can’t escalate from an IM to an audio conference.

Another new capability discussed at the conference is virtualization. As a VMware partner, ADTRAN provides different configurations for NetVanta UC deployments, including public cloud, private cloud for distributed organizations, and managed services through partners. The NetVanta UC server as well as various UC components, including real time voice and voice mail, can be virtualized. What’s interesting about this is that ADTRAN did not have to write any code or do anything differently to virtualize the system and work with VMware – the software runs in Hypervisor without customers having to do any work. The virtual solutions uses the same licensing model, and it’s just a question of where the customer wants to deploy the solution. It’s clear that virtualization is going down market and that small businesses are starting to go in this direction, and ADTRAN is providing a “deployment agnostic” approach so that its offerings can be deployed on any hardware or in any environment.

During Q&A, I asked CEO Tom Stanton about the role of UC for ADTRAN and what his expectations are for UC. He noted that UC is still hard to define and there are multiple definitions of what it is, based on who you talk to, and that tangible usage cases for UC are hard to find and still evolving. Stanton added that UC is an enabler to ADTRAN’s existing system sales and that the UC features are helping the company expand its PBX sales and business. He stated, “Where IP PBX sales are today compared with where they would have been without Objectworld is huge. The UC capabilities from Objectworld lets us custom tailor solutions for enterprises and lets us do things we couldn’t have done 10 years ago.”

ADTRAN acknowledges that several capabilities are missing from its UC offerings, notably Microsoft Lync integration and collaboration tools. According to Wissing, collaboration capabilities will be added through an adjunct to a higher-end system, providing desktop sharing, web conferencing, etc. There is currently no mobile client, although it’s high on the priority list and is expected to be available next year.

I agree with Stanton when he said, “We have great products, but not enough people know about us and we don't have enough mind share.” While this is true for several UC vendors, it’s especially true for ADTRAN, which is a relative newcomer in UC and enterprise communications. The SMB market is hard to crack, and requires the right partners with the right products. The company is building up its channel and actually added about 300 new VARs, but still has a long way to go in terms of brand awareness, especially on the enterprise side. ADTRAN is working on adding even more new partners and giving them the products that SMB customers are looking for today, without lots of bells and whistles. When speaking with a couple ADTRAN customers, it was clear that they especially appreciate the ease of developing applications, as well as the very competitive price of the NetVanta solutions. While ADTRAN probably isn’t the right choice for customers that want more advanced UC and collaboration capabilities today, companies looking for a well-priced solution that is easy to manage and lets you quickly and easily develop customized applications should look into ADTRAN.