Virtual Office Resource

HCS is here to stay, at least for the immediate future. But things could get a bit dicey for Cisco (News - Alert) Spark in light of the BroadSoft acquisition. At least that’s what comments by Cisco’s Rowan Trollope yesterday seemed to indicate. 

Following yesterday’s news that Cisco will be buying BroadSoft (News - Alert), Trollope said the company will continue to offer its HCS solution to large enterprises. Everything downmarket from there, he said, should be a single market, and Cisco is looking to “rationalize” that.

Cisco is “just getting off to the races with Spark,” he said. Trailing off, he added “and before it goes too far down that path….” He also noted that Cisco is seeing a lot of traction with Spark’s ecosystem specifically related to messaging and bots.

HCS is the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution. It’s a collaboration-as-a-service offering featuring conferencing, contact center, IP PBX (News - Alert), and UC functionality. Cisco Spark, meanwhile, supports team messaging, online meetings, and white boarding.

Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Applications Business Group, also said there’s a gap in the mid-market. And he said the BroadSoft deal will help Cisco address that as well as the small and medium business opportunity.

Michael Tessler said the gap is in the 100 to 1,000 market. BroadSoft’s president and CEO, who will join Cisco following the close of the deal, added that “we’re looking to take the service provider channel we have and move them upmarket.”

Trollope said BroadSoft already has some 100,000-line accounts, so there’s no question that its solutions can scale up. But at the top end of the market, he said, Cisco has to move at a measured pace.

And just this week BroadSoft announced its cloud communication suite is now available worldwide. The company has enabled that through the turn up of new data centers in APAC and EMEA.

“This expansion allows multinational enterprises to rely on a single provider across their international locations to collaborate with peers and customers around the globe, while meeting full regulatory and security compliance across different countries,” BroadSoft said in the press release. “The new international footprint will expand the reach of the more than 600 service providers, system integrators, and resellers channel partners in more than 80 countries who provide the BroadSoft Business application suite to their multinational enterprise customers operating in the cloud.”