Fazil Balkaya, a leading market analyst, recently published his thoughts about the market-shaking announcement that Cisco had agreed to purchase BroadSoft for $1.9 billion. As two major players in the UC space, it's fair to say that their integration could be significant for channel providers, end-users, and competitors alike. To help get a better understanding of what this impending buy means for everyone involved, we sat down with Fazil to ask him a few of our most pressing questions.
What's Your View on the Acquisition?
Fazil began by explaining that he believes Cisco chose to make the BroadSoft acquisition as a way of filling some of the gaps in their current go-to-market UC strategy. "If you look at Cisco's goals over the last couple of years, they've been trying to implement Spark into the SMB, as well as the enterprise. Unfortunately, from an SMB perspective, without a full multi-tenant call-control functionality, it's practically impossible to use Spark as a full-blown solution. With the BroadSoft technology, BroadCloud, and BroadWorks, Cisco can begin to address a new business space."
In Fazil's blog, he notes that Cisco is the second biggest provider for /unified-communications/ucaas and Hosted PBX, while BroadSoft is the biggest. The acquisition should mean that Cisco can claim market leadership throughout the Enterprise and SMB space.
Do You Think the CC-One Software is a Better Opportunity for Cisco?
Fazil also commented in his blog post that Cisco already has the largest cloud-contact centre install base globally, but acquiring BroadSoft would mean that the company could bring another huge CCaaS install base into their network.
"The Cisco HCS strategy can compete in the space already, but it hasn't had the ability to address smaller deployments as much like CC-One can from BroadSoft. At the same time, HCS is a software model, whereas CC-One is a fully-cloud model, which makes it easier to deploy and address different parts of the market faster."
Fazil told me that while Cisco won't necessarily be able to cover every deployment size with their acquisition of BroadSoft's CC-One platform, they will have more versatility available to them.
"BroadSoft already has a very sizable base of contact centre installs in a smaller market. If Cisco makes the most of that and builds on the possibilities available, including enhancing Spark Care with some of BroadSoft's call-control and contact centre capabilities, then they can start to address smaller and more simple contact centre deployments, alongside larger enterprise options."
Do You See any Challenges Happening with this Deployment?
As exciting as the Cisco/BroadSoft acquisition might be for many of the people involved, it's worth noting that such a big purchase rarely goes off without a hitch. With that in mind, I was keen to get Fazil's insights on the challenges that the companies might face going forwards.
"I can see a number of roadblocks coming up from several different angles. Starting from a Service Provider point of view, one of the major problems in Europe is service providers prefer a range of vendors to play with - rather than just one."
"Consolidating BroadSoft and Cisco together might prevent service providers from getting that multi-vendor experience. At the same time, there's a portfolio challenge for the channel networks too. There's some obvious overlap between things like Team One, UC-One, BroadSoft Meet, Spark and WebEx. How Cisco will connect with BroadSoft and integrate those products is yet to be seen."
Fazil also noted that prices would need to be addressed too since the price points for Cisco and BroadSoft are so different at this point. While a single offering has been announced as the preferred option for Cisco, it's hard to see what this will mean for the future.
