Ribbon Communications Completes Edgewater Networks Purchase

Ribbon Communications has closed its $110 million acquisition of Edgewater Networks, a provider of network edge orchestration for the SME and UC market.

The acquisition will allow Ribbon to offer its global customer base a complete core-to-edge product portfolio, end-to-end service assurance and analytics offerings, and a fully integrated SD-WAN service.

Patrick Joggerst, Ribbon’s CMO and executive vice president of business development, tells Channel Partners the acquisition allows his company’s partners to deliver expanded and comprehensive offerings from a “recognized market leader.”

Ribbon Communications’ Patrick Joggerst

“This acquisition definitely provides Ribbon and our partners with a competitive edge by allowing us to deliver an even more comprehensive set of solutions for unified communications, UCaaS, UC security, service assurance, policy, analytics and SD-WAN,” he said. “It also offers our customers the ability to easily migrate to hosted UC, UCaaS and SIP trunking. In addition, it provides us with a comprehensive SBC portfolio to deliver secure voice and security services from the core to the cloud to the edge, and from branch to headquarters.”

The acquisition provides Edgewater partners access to a much larger portfolio of “carrier-grade and proven offerings from a market leader, which they can take to their customers and prospects,” Joggerst said.

“Right now the two companies’ partner ecosystems will continue to operate independently, but will leverage joint opportunities where applicable,” he said. “We will continue to integrate the two very complementary organizations with the objective of consolidating the programs into one next year.”

“The acquisition of Edgewater Networks aligns perfectly with our strategic initiatives,” said Fritz Hobbs, Ribbon’s president and CEO. “In addition to becoming a market leader in enterprise session border controllers, it allows us to immediately extend Edgewater solutions internationally, expand our cloud offerings, and enter the SD-WAN market.”