Perspectives has become a fixture in the telecom event world. GENBAND for years invited customers, partners, and press to the annual event. But GENBAND in October merged with Sonus Networks, and the combined company is known as Ribbon Communications. So this week in Los Angeles is the first time the Perspectives event has taken place under the Ribbons Communications banner.

The company is using the gathering to promote the fact that SoftBank is using its new Ribbon Protect offering. And last week Ribbon Communications announced enhancements to its Smart Office UC solution. Perspectives18 also gave the company’s leaders – and its partners Intel, Polycom, Red Hat, and Verizon – an opportunity to offer refreshers and updates on Ribbon Communications to its audience of more than 600 attendees.

Fritz Hobbs, the company’s new president and CEO, took the stage Tuesday morning to give a brief update of Ribbon Communications. The company is a global leader in secure real-time communications, providing software, cloud, and network infrastructure solutions to communications service providers and enterprises, he reminded the audience. It works to transform communications networks, secure communications, and enable cloud communications, he said.

A NASDAQ-traded company, Ribbon Communications has 2,300 employees in 27 countries, more than 1,000 service provider and enterprise customers globally, and more than 600 patents.

Ribbon CTO Kevin Riley said the company’s corporate mission is enabling the transformation of communications services. He added that CSPs are in the midst of a massive architectural shift. He said security is top-of-mind in everything Ribbon does. And he said it’s clear that public cloud is now a viable option for critical data and applications. That means CSPs, suppliers, and other companies need to transform now or fall behind, he added.

The transformation of communications already has begun in light of the telco cloud and the move to network functions virtualization, he said, but one size does not fit all. OSS modernization is also already underway, he added, noting the move toward automation and orchestration. He referenced the new focus on the network edge. And he talked about how new business models enable customers (be they CSPs or enterprises) to consume services and resources in new ways.

For example, he said, CPaaS allows users to pick the parts of the stack they want and to customize their solutions. “Everything is moving to as a service,” he said.

Riley added that CPaaS “is the true cloud endgame. Not only do I want to consume it from the cloud, I want to make it mine.”