BroadSoft, a US supplier of IP telephony products, is seeking UK partners for its unified communications (UC) platform. The company has strong links with its home reseller market and is now looking to strengthen its European presence, according to Leslie Ferry, BroadSoft’s vice president for marketing.
The SME market is showing a growing interest in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy because of the mobility and potential cost-savings it can bring. The problem is that developing a UC infrastructure across mobile and company-based facilities is a challenge beyond these smaller companies’ capabilities.
Cloud PBX
BroadSoft has a range of products and services to open up UC benefits either within a company’s own IP network or through the BroadCloud services.
“We have a growing reseller business within North America that’s starting to drive interest in Europe,” Ferry said. “A lot of that has something to do with the PBX providers and their compensation structure changes, so that’s opportunistic for us. In addition to the market moving to a hosted option the channel resellers and systems integrators are looking for a strong hosted solution as well.”
The company introduced its BroadCloud SaaS in October 2010 and, earlier this month it added Rich Communication Services (RCS) to the suite. This has brought managed service capabilities comprising converged messaging, presence, media sharing, voice and video conferencing.
Backed by the company’s Broadsoft Xtended Marketplace products, developed by its own community, service providers can select applications customised to the needs of their users.
“In the last year we’ve really focused on having an intuitive user experience – a client that’s accessible on your laptop or mobile phone, that integrates all of your communications services into a single application,” said Ferry. “If I’m having an instant messaging chat and it’s getting to be a more-detailed conversation, I can flick my phone icon and escalate that to a video call.”
She announced that the move to the cloud has been a success for the company. Starting with an infrastructure-embedded structure the within a service providers network to a completely hosted model allowed BroadSoft to provide Verizon in the US with a complete hosted service in nine months – “which is almost unheard of in the telecom space,” Ferry said.
“The area we’re focused on is the growing mobility of communications. We need to make sure that whatever service we enable can be accessed on any device. The uniqueness is the openness of our platform and the APIs. We partner with other folks that integrate our communications services with their business processes to have a complete solution for a vertical,” she explained.
This has given the company an offering for the hospitality industry with a property management back office system. It also offers integration with a range of CRM services from Salesforce, SugarCRM and Microsoft, as well as offering Facebook and other social networks. This meets the larger needs of an organisation for tighter integration rather than just servicing their communications needs or their business process needs, Ferry claimed.
The result is a range of services that can be selected to suit an enterprise’s needs and the range can be grown as business processes evolve.
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