Unified Communications Featured Article

FTC, DoJ Green-light Cisco-BroadSoft Combo

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice have green-lighted the Cisco (News - Alert)-BroadSoft combination the companies announced last year.

Cisco plans to by BroadSoft for about $1.9 billion. The deal is set to close this quarter. It was announced in October at the BroadSoft (News - Alert) Connections event.

The deal will help Cisco expand its unified communications play in the cloud and will position it to more effectively serve a greater swath of the business market. It also gives Cisco access to BroadSoft’s communications service provider channel and resources, which are an important go-to-market resource.

Cisco already offers an array of unified communications solutions, like HCS and Spark. But BroadSoft will give it another proven, popular UC platform – and one that is more scalable on the low end yet still suitable for large deployments.

"Together, Cisco and BroadSoft will deliver a robust suite of collaboration capabilities across every market segment," Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Applications Business Group, said when the deal was announced. "We believe that our combined offers, from Cisco's collaboration technology for enterprises to BroadSoft's suite for small and medium businesses delivered through service providers will give customers more choice and flexibility."

Trollope said the plan is to bring a complete end to end stack to its customers, and to do it in a global way. That, he added, is an enormous opportunity. He also said that Cisco is committed to continue the CSP (News - Alert) go-to-market business model, and to support the open platform and handset choice.

Communications analyst Jon Arnold at the time the deal was announced said it will give Cisco “insurance” against the threat from Microsoft (News - Alert) Teams, which he noted had been gaining momentum.

That said, Cisco is a leader in the UC space. Its HCS, or Hosted Collaboration Solution, is a collaboration-as-a-service offering featuring conferencing, contact center, IP PBX (News - Alert), and UC functionality. Cisco Spark supports team messaging, online meetings, and white boarding. Cisco also offers the popular WebEx online meetings and videoconferencing solutions.