Best to read from the bottom up.
Well, Steve, thanks for the question. I wouldn't call Acme nor Oracle a weaker competitor. But I would say that it's offered an opportunity for us to accelerate. The team is really motivated and we're delivering. I'll give you one example. There's a lot of chatter that Oracle bought Acme because their SBC product line could be virtualized and placed in software. We've done that. They're still talking about it. So we believe we're accelerating. We believe we're leading. And I'd rather not get too caught up on a call like this or in, frankly, any public environment bad mouthing them. What we -- I do want to say to you, I'm not trying to be overly coy here. Of course, any time an industry leader gets bought, you got turn in a team, you got pricing strategies, you got turn in the channel and all of those opportunities, I think, are beginning to show up as opportunities for Sonus, and we're just going to leverage them as best we can.
But our story is our story. We've had this story, literally, since we called -- we got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong when me met with you in I guess it was June 2011, I was in the saddle about 9 months, we said we hadn't been out there for 6 to 7 years in the public domain, and we went out and said we've got to be transparent with the street. And what we said was there will be a second-generation architecture. It will be linked to scalability, policy, quality of service and transcoding. The world will get more complicated, and when that happens, it will be our opportunity. So I would say, it's in part the ownership change, but far more important is the architectural change. And for them, there's probably, my guess is, a wake-up call to: "Wow", in the midst of 2 changes, it's hard to make them both elegantly. And we're going to try to harvest that as best we can, all right?
OperatorAt this time, there are no questions. I'll turn it back over to you.Raymond P.
DolanWell, thank you very much, and thanks to all of the folks on this call for following our company through the 3-year journey on my watch. This is the best hand I've ever had to play in my 30 years of commercial experience. The combination of an innovation engine that this team has stepped up to becoming, and it was an innovation engine, make no mistake, at the turn-of-the-century. But that was during the bubble when innovation engines didn't have to get things all the way to the bottom line to create value. The world has changed and this team knows that. And this innovation will drive all the way through the financial leverage and that journey starts now and will continue going forward. So thanks to all of you for being patient, working through all of our discussions of trials, all of the complexity associated with the old Sonus and for working with us into the new generation of Sonus going forward. I really appreciate that, and we look forward to sharing more with you on future calls. Thank you,
operator.OperatorThank you, sir. e'll guide to next year when we get there. But some of the players are acting like NASCAR drivers and they're pivoting around a big oval and they're keeping their speed up, and others almost stopping and pausing and choking and reorienting. And we put their results in and guide at our own peril, right? And so that's one of the most difficult challenges I face is trying to figure out when all those are happening. But as I meet with these people personally and through Todd and other members of the leadership team, I'm convinced that the architectural shift is happening.
It masks the transition we're going through. And the visual image that I have or the metaphor that I use is when somebody tries to turn 90 degrees -- we've all driven cars before. What you do is you slow down in a turn and you accelerate out of the turn. Even the most nimble NASCAR driver slow down in the turn, okay, and accelerate on the straightaway. This industry is going through a turn and is causing some timing issues and is impacting the results of everybody.
But the good news is a company that named themselves Acme Packet, because they thought the job was moving packets and nothing else mattered, okay, I think the new ownership is waking up to the fact it's a little more complicated than that. Policy matters, QOS matters, Scale matters. Okay? So we're game on in the next second generation of 2.0 of this industry architecture, and we're not just stealing shares at the second source.
We're stealing mind share, and we're owning some of the new architecture as these companies think through their cloud strategies.
When I get up in the morning, I put on my Sonus CEO hat. I draw off from 30-plus years of experience in the communications sector. And as you probably remember, my last experience was as a CEO of Flarion. And I'd like to share with you what I learned there because I hope it will make me predictable in what I'm trying to bring into the leadership role at Sonus.
We called the turn to the mobile Internet in 2000. Of course, the market melted down the next month, hopefully we didn't cause that, but we scrambled and we survived with a bold mission of calling the mobile Internet when most of the world was living in a walled garden and couldn't see the fact that at some point in time, somebody would mobilize the whole Internet.
We called for an architectural shift that needed to be OFDM-based for reasons that are too arcane to bring into this call. And we said that the war would be fought on latency for technology and economics, principally. And we were right. Now the fact is we were a small-cap, private, venture-backed company that didn't have the voice it needed to finish that mission, and we sold into Qualcomm, which is exactly what should have happened.
Fast forward. I stand up today as the CEO of Sonus, and I know that we have the balance sheet, team and strength and customer commitments to fully participate in the same architectural shift, except this time, the architectural shift is the move to the cloud and the onset of unified communications as voice becomes coupled with video, data, chat and the enterprise and service provider markets collide over the next several years into one unified market that's going to allow SPs to deliver cloud-based services into the enterprise. That's the vision we're following. The path to that is through software. And we launched our SDN strategy last month. I'm extremely proud of the team. That was a Q1 strategy we pulled up almost 2 quarters. This team is executing on time and in fact, early, at a strategic level. There was a saying 20 years ago, "The network is the computer." Let's update that, "The network is the software." Everything else is myths. And we have moved the majority of our SBC into the software space, and the rest will follow early next year, and we will be the path to becoming a software company. I couldn't be more excited,
These are roadmap wins. These are profound. Okay? And I couldn't be more excited about it, and I'm thrilled that, that became the first question because that's exactly why I put it into the script. I think for people to understand the progress we're making, there needs to be an indication of whether we're making progress, just simply milking gateway customers into SBCs or whether in fact we're participating in the architectural transition that the industry is going through. And I'm convinced that it's the latter. |
