For the last twenty years, Broadsoft has been the leading cloud communication services vendor.
They have been providing the building blocks Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). Service providers use to build cloud-based communications services such as voice, video, web conferencing, team messaging, and contextual services.
Broadsoft based solutions run on almost any type of network, are scalable, multi-tenant, and extremely reliable. This has led to them being used by more than 600 carriers and 25 of the largest UCaaS service providers in 80 countries, accounting for 45% of the world’s UCaaS market.
Although excellent at providing UCaaS, users complained about the complexity of Broadsoft’s native administration web portals; they require a high degree of platform knowledge and expertise to operate, and using them is time-consuming and error-prone.
Service providers and IT administrators wanted a more straightforward way of provisioning and managing the Broadsoft platforms. Since 2012, Loki, a Leonid Systems product, has provided a solution that has been widely adopted.
In the 4th quarter of 2017 Broadsoft conducted their annual survey to assess enterprise end-users perspectives on UCaaS, Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and team collaboration. Below are the key points that came out of that survey; they are being realized today.
5 Key Points from the Broadsoft Cloud Collaboration Survey:
- Cloud unified communications (UC) adoption is accelerating; buying decisions are imminent and on-premise systems are poised for cloud migration.
- UCaaS is core to customers’ digital transformation strategy; it addresses core business priorities of: productivity, mobility, agility, and operation.
- Customers want complete, integrated and innovative service bundles – service providers with partial offers may get left behind.
- Service providers are strongly positioned to capture the cloud transition opportunity though there is increasing competition from global Software as a Service (SaaS) players.
- Digital engagement and delivery channels are essential.
In early 2018 Cisco bought Broadsoft; the combination of Broadsoft and Cisco HCS service providers gave them control of over 55% of the world’s UCaaS market.
Then, Cisco began merging the Broadsoft platforms, BroadWorks and BroadCloud, with their architecture, devices, and applications.
For example, the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan, aimed at the medium-sized business market (100 – 1000 staff members), combines BroadCloud calling, Webex Teams, and the Cisco Calling App client.
Not long after their purchase of Broadsoft, Cisco announced that they were going to discontinue support for the Broadsoft Classic Portal – Loki.
These events have raised several questions for service providers and IT managers around the provisioning and management of UCaaS systems using Broadsoft and/or Cisco products.
1. How do you manage hybrid Cisco – Broadsoft platforms?
Cisco now offers two platforms to service providers: one (partner hosted) consisting of Broadsoft BroadWorks and Cisco HCS, and the other (hosted in the Cisco cloud) containing Broadsoft BroadCloud and Cisco Webex.
UCaaS service providers utilizing these platforms will need to manage hybrid environments; a platform designed to automate and manage hybrid-cloud and hybrid-vendor UC solutions.
UCaaS service providers will need a UC provisioning and management platform that has native connectors to both Cisco and Broadsoft platforms.
Service providers must be able to integrate Cisco Webex Teams with the BroadWorks platform services and integrate fixed-mobile architectures across the BroadCloud platform and Cisco HCS.
2. How do you manage Broadsoft platforms?
With the difficulty of using the standard Broadsoft administration portal still an issue and the Broadsoft Classic Portals no longer an option – service providers, IT administrators, and end-users need a solution for managing existing and new Broadsoft UCaaS platforms
Broadsoft UCaaS service providers need to be able to automate the full lifecycle of their customers - providing: vertical industry design, customer onboarding, operational administration, and customer self-administration portals.
They need a full UCaaS management toolset (fulfillment, assurance, analytics, billing) for existing and new deployments. And a single point of integration for the Broadsoft platforms to provider and customer business support systems (BSS) and operational support systems (OSS).
As a final note, Kurmi Software Suite is able to answer these questions more than adequately. It can satisfy the needs of service providers, IT administrators, and end users.
Through a simple, intuitive interface Kurmi can provide all the functionality (and more) that was offered by the Broadsoft Classic Portal.
