The Market Impact of Cisco's BroadSoft Acquisition: Page 4 of 7

Cisco Plus BroadSoft: Benefits for the End Users

End user organizations relying on BroadSoft's cloud solutions or on Cisco's on-premises offerings will have new and differentiated value propositions available to them from the combined company. Among these are the following:

1. A Consistent Meeting and Team Workspace Experience -- When Cisco offered both Spark and WebEx, there were two different meeting experiences, Spark Meetings and WebEx Meetings. These have now been rationalized into a single meeting experience: All meetings are hosted in Webex, and they all have the same look and feel.

   Furthermore, Cisco has made the new Webex Meetings available via a WebRTC-client: People who join a Webex Meeting using a browser have the same capabilities as those who download and install the Webex Teams client, including the ability to host and share content.

   Finally, while previously there were two Outlook plug-ins for scheduling meetings -- one for Spark and one for WebEx -- Cisco has rationalized these as well, and there will now be only one Outlook plug-in to schedule meetings, Webex Meetings.

    

2. Transitioning to Cloud with Flexible Licensing -- Webex Calling, powered by BroadCloud coupled with Flex Plan licensing, provides an easy on-ramp to cloud for the 100 million existing Cisco on-premises customers who want to move all or part of their workforce to a cloud-based solution. End user organizations can transition from their market leading on-premises product, Cisco UCM, to the market leading UCaaS offerings hosted by Cisco. And, because the combined Cisco-Broadsoft cloud Calling offer can economically support small numbers of workers, the transition to cloud can begin gradually with small groups or branch locations -- something that was more challenging when trying to move to an HCS-based solution, which usually required larger numbers of user seats. Thus, the 100 million existing Cisco customers can easily transition, when they are ready, from any of their current Cisco platforms to a cloud-based solution.

    

3. Collaboration via Cisco's Market Leading Video Solutions -- Existing BroadSoft subscribers will have bundled access to Webex Meetings, Webex Teams, and Cisco's market leading video solutions, including the 55-inch and 70-inch Webex Boards. Webex Meetings, which include Webex Teams licenses, are all included as part of the Webex Meetings Flex Plan license referenced above. Webex Boards can be purchased outright or on a subscription basis, if desired.

   The benefit to both BroadSoft and Cisco users is that phones, Webex Teams clients, Jabber clients, and Cisco video devices will seamlessly integrate into a single collaborative meeting experience regardless of whether the end user is served by an on-premises Cisco PBX, a BroadWorks cloud, or a Cisco HCS UCaaS solution. Cisco's support for WebRTC also allows easy guest access with full meeting participation, including screen sharing, via a Web browser. UC-One Communicator users will join Webex Meetings by clicking on an IM link, which will launch Webex's WebRTC interface. The importance of being able to easily connect in any of these ways cannot be overstated, as it weaves full collaboration into the workplace, allowing people to focus on work and not on technology.

    

4. Access to Cisco Customer Journey Platform: BroadSoft's Multitenant Cloud-Based Contact Center -- As mentioned above, Cisco had three contact center solutions before the BroadSoft acquisition, but none of them were entirely suitable for cloud subscribers working in small-to-medium sized businesses. Cisco's CJP (formerly BroadSoft CC-One) remedies this shortcoming by offering a fully-featured multitenant cloud-based contact center that scales from small numbers of agents to thousands of agents. Furthermore, an agent's telephone can be connected to a BroadSoft cloud (BroadWorks or Webex Calling) or to an on-premises PBX, because CJP will work with on-premises PBXs as well. This gives existing Cisco customers an easy way to move some contact center agents entirely to the cloud while giving other agents a hybrid solution where the telephone is homed to a Cisco on-premises PBX while the agent's contact center is CJP in the cloud.

    

   CJP also has a feature set that makes it attractive generally. For example, CJP has unique analytics and cloud routing capabilities that allow organizations to focus on outcomes and make changes to systems and routing to reinforce those outcomes. The analytics engine continuously examines customer interaction data from multiple contact center databases and applies predictive analytics to segment and profile individual customers, routing customers to the agent whose performance promotes the desired outcomes. For example, if on a given day a particular agent is closing well or upselling well to a particular set of customers, the analytics engine will route more calls from that customer segment to that agent. Conversely, if an agent is off his or her game on a given day, the analytics engine will route fewer calls or lower priority calls to that particular agent.

   CJP, hosted in the cloud, also has the ability to route between multiple on-premises contact centers. It can provide the glue between contact centers in different locations and even contact centers from different manufacturers. Consequently, organizations can keep what they have and upgrade when they are ready to a CJP cloud contact center hosted in the Cisco Collaboration Cloud.

    

5. Hybrid Solutions Offering Cloud Agility and Functionality While Maintaining Existing Investment -- Generally, telephony call control has a mature feature set, and investment industry-wide in voice features and functionality is minimal. Most of the investment today is in communications and collaboration technology based in the cloud, and Cisco is no exception, investing heavily in Webex and in its video communications portfolio.

   With BroadSoft's BroadWorks, BroadCloud, and CC-One now part of Cisco's solution set, it can offer customers the option to migrate to best-in-class cloud collaboration functionality while maintaining investments already made in on-premises call control. Flex Plan licensing allows Cisco customers to continue using an on-premises UCM or BE6/7K PBX deployment, while concurrently deploying Webex Teams, WebEx Meetings, and CJP -- all of which run in Cisco's cloud and are adding functionality regularly due to agile software development practices. These hybrid solutions and flexible licensing options allow organizations to move telephony to Cisco's cloud when the on-premises assets become fully depreciated or when other drivers cause an organization to seek an all-cloud solution.

    

6. Cisco and Microsoft -- Cisco realizes that although it has market leading telephony, meeting, and video solutions, many of its customers also deploy Microsoft Office software to the desktop. In a significant olive branch move, Cisco is licensing the Microsoft Office 365 E3 plan and will deploy the Office Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc.) from Microsoft's cloud. In addition, Cisco is enabling integration between its solutions and Active Directory and Exchange as delivered by Office 365. This means that other customers who have deployed Office 365 can also use these same solutions.

   One of the most common questions organizations ask when discussing Cisco and Microsoft is how to make solutions from these companies play together. This question arises because roughly 40% of the market has Cisco telephony and over 50% of the market has some combination of Microsoft Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, or Lync deployed. To this end, Cisco has demonstrated a Webex bot for Microsoft Teams that will enable Microsoft Teams users to easily launch Webex-based meetings for the entire team.

   While there are ways to enable additional interoperability, a sensible response is always focused around user experience and ease of use: If you want a truly unified communications solution, where you can seamlessly move between messaging, voice, collaboration, and video, it's best to standardize on one vendor.

   With Microsoft's decision to depreciate Skype for Business in the Office 365 cloud, these users must turn to Microsoft Teams or consider alternative solutions. Microsoft Teams is so different from Skype for Business, and the usage model via Microsoft Teams channels and connectors is so different, that Skype for Business users are going to have to go through a significant learning curve to become proficient with Microsoft Teams.

   In fairness, Webex Teams will also require some learning on the part of end users; but if an organization must expend this effort regardless of whether it uses Microsoft Teams or Webex Teams, it may make sense for companies to consider whether this is a good time to standardize on Cisco or Microsoft across the board for their communications and collaboration needs.