Cisco has made many decisions regarding rationalization both within the Cisco portfolio and the BroadSoft portfolio and how Cisco plans to take the combined portfolio to market.
Rationalizing the Spark and Webex Assets
Spark was Cisco's cloud-based team workspace and collaboration solution. Spark had its own ecosystem of endpoints along with meeting capabilities and telephony functionalities. With Spark, users could also join meetings hosted by Webex.
In an effort to have a more consistent branding and licensing approach, the Webex brand has been expanded to include the team workspace capabilities of Spark and the Spark Calling functionality. Spark has been rebranded as Webex Teams, and Spark Calling is now branded Webex Calling. Webex will now have three elements: Meetings, Teams, and Calling, along with Webex-branded devices such as telephones and the Webex Board for video and whiteboarding.
A fundamental change to Webex Calling is that it will be supported by BroadCloud, a Cisco hosted version of BroadWorks run in the Cisco Webex cloud. BroadCloud gives Webex Calling the most complete and robust feature set of any cloud-based telephony platform in the market, providing Cisco with an exceptionally strong offering in the emerging and highly competitive telephony-enabled team collaboration market.
The New Contact Center: Customer Journey Platform
Several years ago, BroadSoft bought Transera -- a cloud-based multitenant contact center provider -- integrated it with BroadWorks, and sold it under the brand name "CC-One." Cisco has rebranded CC-One as "Customer Journey Platform" (CJP).
Although Cisco already had three contact center offerings -- Unified Contact Center Enterprise, Unified Contact Center Express, and Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center (sold with HCS cloud deployments) -- none of them are multitenant, nor were they built specifically for a cloud deployment.
With CJP, Cisco now has a fully-featured, multitenant cloud-based contact center solution that partners can offer to their customers and prospects -- a capability that was sorely missing in Cisco's product portfolio. CJP provides Cisco with a far greater opportunity to compete with Genesys (PureCloud), Nice (inContact), and many other cloud-based contact center providers.
BroadSoft Team-One Rationalization
Prior to the acquisition, a small number of BroadSoft service providers ordered BroadSoft's team workspace product, branded Team-One, for inclusion into the customized offerings these service providers sell to their own customers. Cisco is honoring BroadSoft's Team-One commitments, delivering it to these service providers. Cisco will continue to support them, but no new providers will be added.
The Future of BroadSoft UC-One
UC-One is BroadSoft's umbrella brand for service providers who deploy BroadWorks or BroadCloud voice along with any of BroadSoft's three UC and meeting clients: Meet, Connect, and Communicator. In nearly all instances, UC-One is rebranded by the service provider. Furthermore, it may be customized to the specific markets in which the service provider operates.
There are no changes to BroadSoft UC-One. Service providers will continue to white label UC-One, define their own offerings based on UC-One, and charge customers what their individual markets will bear. If they choose, service providers can also sell Cisco's non-customizable Webex-branded Meetings and Teams offering.
BroadCloud Under Cisco
Most of BroadSoft's service provider partners license BroadWorks and deploy it in their own service clouds. However, BroadSoft also hosted a version of BroadWorks in its own data centers along with service management capabilities and provided it to its partners under the BroadCloud brand. BroadCloud will remain available to partners and service providers who may not want to stand up their own deployments of BroadWorks.
BroadCloud, which will also enable Webex Calling, is available in nine countries: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Japan. By the end of 2018 it will also be operational in Spain, Mexico, and New Zealand; multinationals using BroadCloud with branch offices outside of these countries can home their users to the BroadCloud instance running in one of these countries.
