You’ve probably heard that the UC Expo 2018 recently took place at the Excel Centre, London. Rob Scott from the site UC Today shared a conversation with Craig Decker, the Managing Director EMEA at BroadSoft. Decker has been a part of BroadSoft for over a decade and so bears a valuable opinion on all the ins and outs of the acquisition. They discussed the developments that have occurred since the widely reported Cisco partnership and some interesting insights were reported into the current state and the future of this venture.

BroadSoft Inc. is a multinational communication software and service provider which partners with the majority of the worlds largest service providers in 80 countries. The acquisition was initiated by Cisco to “accelerate their own cloud strategy and collaboration portfolio by adding the industry’s leading cloud calling and contact center solutions to Cisco’s leading calling, meetings, messaging, customer care, hardware endpoints and services portfolio” (Cisco press release).

When the combined platform is finalised, a best-of-breed solution will be available for businesses of all sizes. The platform will be extremely flexible, giving opportunity to deploy the solution on-prem, in the cloud or as a hybrid-cloud solution.

The partnership with a technology giant such as Cisco has had a significant effect on BroadSoft and there has apparently been a large transformation in the firm in the months following the deal.

Before the acquisition, Decker states that because they had been purely service provider oriented, most enterprise companies barely knew about them. However, since the big news regarding them and Cisco, innumerable enterprise service providers are suddenly seeing the potential in the joint platform that is being constructed and attempting to go into business with them.

It seems as if the partnership has gone fairly smoothly for both parties involved. Decker explained how open and welcoming Cisco has been. Often during periods of great change, staff can lose focus but Decker ensures that he has seen the opposite. Because the process has been so straightforward, BroadSoft employees can see the opportunity and have remained motivated.

When Scott asked Decker what he believed the future held for this partnership Decker was extremely optimistic. He mentioned that they are investigating AI and contextual search and other disruptive technology, in regards to their great wealth of information that currently sits in the cloud. This gives them a great opportunity to run nurture programs and analytics that will allow them to develop a more functional environment for their users.

Decker commented that he sees more contextual capabilities being brought into systems on the horizon in this industry. This will inevitably make managing communication and collaboration simpler for firms.

(You can read the full article and interview on UC Today, here.)