Cisco's acquisition of BroadSoft, announced last year and confirmed earlier this year, represents one of the largest consolidations in the UC in market in recent years. The purchase is designed to boost Cisco's cloud strategy and enhance their collaboration portfolio by adding the industries' leading cloud communication and contact centre solution to their existing proposition.
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Iain Sinnott, Sales Director, VanillaIP and Uboss[/caption]
Partners, customers and the industry in general have speculated about how the acquisition will affect ongoing BroadSoft business. We spoke to a major BroadSoft partner to try and understand more about the ramifications of Cisco's purchase. Iain Sinnott, Sales Director at DRD Communications, is well placed to understand how any changes will affect partners and customers. DRD Communications is made up of several businesses. Two of those are VanillaIP and Uboss.
VanillaIP is one of the UK's premier cloud communications providers with one of their primary propositions being BroadSoft's Hosted PBX solution. Uboss provide a back-end office provisioning, billing and integration platform to enable cloud voice and application providers to simplify and enhance their offerings to customers. Although compatible with a huge range of different CC platforms, some of the main systems used with Uboss are BroadWorks based.
With involvement in two very different business, both partnering with BroadSoft in distinct fashions, Iain has an interesting perspective and insight into Cisco BroadSoft and was available to talk to us about the various aspects following the acquisition.
You have been working with BroadSoft for nearly 15 years, what did the relationship look like before any news of the acquisition?
"BroadSoft have always been the ones who could deliver a rock solid platform with good functionality. Their team worked well with us initially. The core centralised piece of business for us, in the heart of our proposition to our customers, is that we have all seen the relationship with BroadSoft as a massive asset."
"Possibly a more worrying trend has been the perceived knee jerk reaction to the wall street requirement, we saw a business that wasn't necessarily driven by an ideology but one that had to put some signs out to the money men that they were doing the right things. Rolling up to the announcement of the buyout, perhaps the only concern was the direction was being influenced by the wrong elements of business and that we could do with more continuity on the development of the product."
"Before the announcement last year, we had probably seen a bit of step up (from BroadSoft) in terms of our account management. Probably partly down to our sales performance and growth itself but also an improvement over the few months prior."
How did you find out about the news?
"Our Uboss product is a sponsor of BroadSoft Connections so we were all out there in Phoenix for the event. We have our trade stand there and talk to a lot of members of the BroadSoft community. Speculation was that there was going to be some sort of purchase. We weren't sure who, we were all a little bit concerned about venture capital and a little bit concerned about which of the big players could come and buy the business."
"I have to say I think the initial reaction when it was announced that it was Cisco, I think a lot of us were very happy."
"Not sure the hardware guys were quite sure where it left them but the community itself saw this as a really positive step. I think it was a great relief to see it going to someone who recognised the value of the SP community. Notwithstanding that they are a massive name and massive company and provide isolation from this wall street concern we had before. This a strong move for the BroadSoft community and allows us to think about taking our direction forward and continuing with our roadmap of development around that BroadSoft proposition."
