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Why Cisco?
Over the past few months, BroadSoft was rumored to be talking with various parties, including private equity firms, Amazon, Cisco, and Oracle. My bets were on pretty much anyone else but Cisco. What I'd missed was an earlier Cisco decision to reduce its focus on Spark Calling, which makes BroadSoft's acquisition much more meaningful. Here follows a brief overview of Cisco's current UCaaS portfolio.
Building upon its extensive experience, technology innovation, and market share leadership in the on-premises communications market, Cisco launched Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) in 2011 to address untapped demand for cloud communications in the medium and large enterprise customer segment. Cisco HCS is targeted primarily at distributed organizations of more than 250 users and creates considerable opportunities to address the needs of Cisco's existing premises-based UCC customers. Customers can deploy hybrid architectures, integrating existing systems in some locations with cloud services in others, or they can migrate the entire enterprise infrastructure to the cloud.
Cisco minimizes potential channel conflict by providing incentives to its internal salesforce to generate and pass leads on to service provider partners. Further, Cisco supports partners through volume discounts, joint marketing, training and certifications, and various other programs. It frequently assists providers with UCaaS implementations by leveraging its strong professional services resources and expertise.
In 2015, Cisco further diversified and strengthened its hosted IP telephony and UCaaS growth strategy with the launch of Spark, a cloud-based multimedia collaboration solution that's highly complementary to the rest of its cloud communications portfolio. Spark provides PBX functionality, PSTN calling, and a broad suite of team collaboration tools, including persistent group chat, file sharing, and multiparty video and Web conferencing. Hosted by Cisco, but sold primarily through partners, Spark had been intended to help the company further differentiate itself from other hosted IP telephony and UCaaS technology providers and accelerate growth in cloud communications.
Spark can be deployed as a cloud PBX or as an adjunct to a Cisco HCS or premises-based Unified Communications Manager (UCM) deployment. Spark Hybrid Services help ensure tight integration and strong synergies between Spark and other Cisco technology investments. More specifically, Hybrid Call Service integrates customers' existing Cisco call-control solutions with the Cisco Spark service. Thus businesses can use the Spark app as a mobile soft client for voice and video calling, enable instant desktop sharing for Spark users on the same call, and access call history from on-premises phones through the Spark client. Hybrid Calendar and Hybrid Directory services are also available.
In all Spark deployments, partners provide the PSTN connectivity. This setup eliminates direct competition between Cisco and its UCaaS partners.
Spark Flex plans provide additional flexibility to Cisco partners and end customers. They enable users of both premises-based and hosted Cisco solutions to leverage an OPEX payment model, which reduces upfront investments, creates a smoother path to the cloud, and helps manage all users (prem-based and cloud) in a similar fashion.
Continue to next page: Where BroadSoft Fits In
