Cisco Nabs BroadSoft in Huge UC Play

Cisco Systems has picked up unified communications and VoIP giant BroadSoft for $1.9 billion.

The move continues Cisco’s transformation from hardware vendor to services powerhouse.  Cisco’s collaboration portfolio already includes WebEx and Spark, which it sells directly to end users via channel partners, but BroadSoft will give it the ability to target a much larger base of companies, including large enterprises, via deep relationships with service providers.

 

Rob Salvagno, vice president of corporate business development at Cisco, discussed synergies in a company blog post.

“Collaboration is the first step to business digitization and BroadSoft has partnerships with over 450 telecom carriers in 80 countries — including 25 of the top 30 globally — to 19+ million BroadSoft business subscribers,” he said. “BroadSoft’s portfolio is complementary to our existing on premises and enterprise-centric hosted collaboration solutions (HCS), as well as Cisco’s overall cloud investment strategy.”

BroadSoft was founded in 1998 and went public in 2010. This deal is expected to close during Cisco’s first quarter calendar year in 2018.

“This acquisition is another nail in the legacy PBX coffin and a validation for the new cloud economy,” said Drew Lydecker, president and co-founder of master agency AVANT. “At AVANT, we have seen a doubling of our UCaaS revenue with laser focused cloud providers. This is a smart move for Cisco, on the heels of their SD-WAN acquisition. It’s 1,000% in alignment with the trends we are seeing in the market: Everything is moving toward software-defined solutions; it’s a subscription economy; and the shortage of IT talent is increasing.”