Unified Communications Featured Article

Cisco Closes the BroadSoft Deal

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Cisco (News - Alert) has closed the $1.9 billion BroadSoft acquisition it announced last year.

BroadSoft (News - Alert) – including former BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler and his team – is now part of Cisco's Unified Communications Technology Group. That group is led by Cisco Vice President and General Manager Tom Puorro. Cisco’s UC group is within its Applications Group, which Rowan Trollope heads up.

This deal helps Cisco escalate its cloud-based business communications solution effort. It enables Cisco to more effectively reach small and medium businesses with unified communications solutions. And it provides Cisco with an established ecosystem of go-to-market communications service provider partners, and a related program to supply the CSPs with marketing materials and other support.

“More and more businesses expect fully featured calling, meeting, messaging and contact center solutions with the ability to deploy them flexibly – on premises, in the cloud, or as hybrid solutions to leverage existing investments,” Cisco said in a press release. “By combining BroadSoft’s open interface and standards-based solutions primarily delivered via service provider partners, with Cisco’s existing portfolio, the combined company will offer best-of-breed solutions for businesses of all sizes which will be delivered through VAR and service provider partners. Together, Cisco and BroadSoft will deliver a full suite of rich collaboration experiences to power the future of work.”

In announcing the BroadSoft acquisition in October, Trollope talked about the gap in the mid-market. And Tessler noted it too, and he expressed the desire by BroadSoft’s CSP (News - Alert) partners to move upmarket.

Cisco offers an array of business communications solutions.

• That includes the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, better known as HCS. It’s a collaboration-as-a-service offering featuring conferencing, contact center, IP PBX (News - Alert), and UC functionality.

• It provides Cisco Spark. That supports team messaging, online meetings, and white boarding.

• And, of course, it has the popular online meeting and videoconferencing platform WebEx.

Cisco is a leader in the UC space, which is poised to be worth $96 billion by 2023 and more than $143 billion by 2024, according to analysts. But the other leader – Microsoft (News - Alert) – is seeing strong momentum with its Microsoft Teams solutions, while Spark is not providing the results Cisco has been seeking.