In November 2019, Ribbon announced the acquisition of ECI Telecom Group, a global provider of end-to-end package optical transport and SDN/NFV, for 32.5 million shares of Ribbon and US$324 million in cash. In this way, a company with annual revenues of more than US 900 million (based on Combined FYE 2018 data of Ribbon and ECI) and 4,000 employees was established. In 2020, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, it was primarily dedicated to integration, which as Kevin Riley, CTO and Executive VP of Advanced R&D at Ribbon highlighted, moves the firm beyond voice to "the infrastructure side of data".