TMCnet recently asked some of the leading lights in the industry for their thoughts about 2011 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Here’s what Leslie Ferry, vice president of marketing at BroadSoft (News - Alert) Inc., had to say.

What was your company’s greatest achievement in 2011?

Ferry: BroadSoft’s greatest achievement this year has been the expansion of our hosted unified communications services capabilities and the ability to access these modern communication services on mobile devices, such as smartphones, laptops and tablets. We want to enable users to have immediate access to the communication services that best meet their situation in order to keep them connected from anywhere, at anytime. 

Some of the new services introduced this year include web conferencing, high-definition audio conferencing, instant messaging and presence and text messaging, using a fixed-line work or home number. Enterprises are going mobile at an extremely rapid pace. And BroadSoft believes that every business communications service should be accessible on a mobile device with a consistent user interface. We also know that going forward our services capabilities will be increasingly evaluated by the user interaction with that service.  

To help ensure a superior, tightly integrated user experience of our unified communication services, we recently introduced BroadTouch, our new line of user clients that will help service providers deliver unified communications services more seamlessly across a variety of devices. 

With BroadTouch, service providers will have the ability to offer their enterprise and consumer customers a single, intuitive user interface where they can access all of their UC services, whether from a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet. BroadTouch, together with our UC services, increase employee efficiency and productivity and enable users to easily transition between different environments, home or office, with a more consistent user experience.

What are your business goals for 2012?

Ferry: We will continue to innovate on behalf of our service provider customers in 2012, extending our core competencies to include intuitive user interfaces across all of a user’s communication devices. 

If 2011 was the year of the cloud/or tablet, 2012 will be the year of …

Ferry: seamlessness. Today, services are typically tied to a device. For example, using your mobile number, you can only make calls or send text messages from your mobile phone. We all now have multiple devices connected to a service providers’ network, and we expect our communication services to work the same way across all of our communication devices. Think of how we use e-mail from our laptop, mobile and tablet in a seamless way today. We all want this same, integrated, seamless experience across our real-time communication services.

So what does this look like? Users install applications on their many devices and these devices then register with their cloud communication services. These applications ensure a seamless experience across the devices, so that users can establish service from the device.

The applications provide access to a full range of services including video calling, conferencing, voicemail, text messaging, collaboration, chat and presence. We believe that service providers who can deliver on this superior user experience will gain market share in the increasingly competitive communications industry, as well as providing the right experience on the right device – seamlessly. 

End users will have the freedom to use the right device at the right time for work or pleasure. Why do so many of us have to pick up our phones to send a text message when we are working on our laptops? Why must we use special devices for video calling? Why must we dial into multiple devices to retrieve voicemail? We believe that service providers who fundamentally redefine the user experience will create dramatic strategic advantages over their competition.