Broadsoft is Now a SP

Broadsoft Connections 2013 kicked off with the CEO keynote. The twitter stream for #BSFTconnections has been interesting. UC-One is the answer to BYOD and mobile. Telstra has been a customer for 10 years – with 250K seats. I know, right? That isn’t a lot for ten years worth of effort.

The big news though: Broadsoft will become a white-label service provider!

My guess is that growth is slowing down. Broadsoft has 400+ service providers globally. How many more are there that can spend a million to start providing VoIP?

When you look at the inner workings of VZ and VCE, it was going to come to this. If Broadsoft wants its service providers to run BroadWorks, BroadCloud and BroadEverything*, then it was going to have to start doing the platform delivery. Kind of like PAAS.

Also, to grow BSFT will want to chase smaller providers and enterprise, neither of whom want to run the system. It is similar to Microsoft’s OCS that became Lync. It was just too complex for most IT shops to run it themselves.

This isn’t that surprising of a move. Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and Mitel have all gone the route of vendor providing the whole service. It does present a problem for the Cloud Comm Alliance, since this will seem like a direct competition from the vendor. Well, ISPs have been experiencing that since 1999, so welcome to the party.

Interesting to watch for sure.

UPDATE / Correction

“User Experience: BroadWorks Collaborate To arm service providers with flexibility in how they acquire and deliver UC services, BroadSoft is introducing BroadWorks Collaborate — a new delivery model that makes UC services available through server software that resides within the service provider’s network. Service providers now have the ability to utilize BroadSoft’s UC capabilities via BroadWorks(R) server software or through BroadCloud(R), BroadSoft’s fully-hosted cloud platform.” [PR] Still sounds like a SAAS / PAAs model to me.

*BroadEverything is a joke of mine.

Tags: broadsoft
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