With BroadSoft set to launch their BroadCloud offering with partner Wavenet at the forthcoming Convergence Summit in October we spoke to the two companies in order to give readers a preview of what they will see at the show
Comms Business Magazine (CBM): What is BroadCloud and how is it different from existing Broadsoft products?
Mike Wilkinson - VP Product Marketing at BroadSoft (MW): BroadCloud is a fully managed white-label service that delivers comprehensive unified communications services, through BroadSoft’s cloud infrastructure. Service providers and channel partners are able to rebrand BroadCloud services and sell to their customers, retaining their customer relationship and brand footprint. BroadCloud delivers an extensive set of UC features, including voice, video, instant messaging & presence, web collaboration and desktop sharing; and its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model ensures rapid proliferation of multimedia applications to end users.
CBM: What are the key benefits of BroadCloud for resellers?
MW: For several years, service providers and resellers have relied on the BroadWorks Telephony Application Server to provide their business customers and consumers with a range of communications applications from a common network platform, including unified communications, Hosted PBX/IP Centrex, SIP trunking and mobile unified communications.
As competitive dynamics evolved, what we heard from many of our service provider customers is a desire to leverage all of BroadWorks’ call control and PBX features and functionality – as well as unified communications – as a cloud solution that enables them – and their resellers – to rapidly bring these services to market, reduce upfront CapEx costs associated with legacy systems, and have the ability to maintain a single software version for all services.
Bill Dawson – MD of Wavenet (BD): As a fully managed, cloud-based service, BroadCloud enables resellers to speed time-to-market for unified communications, and therefore accelerates time to new service revenue. This model also reduces costs and complexities associated with the implementation, management and billing of UC services. BroadSoft wraps its UC applications with a fully managed, web-based end-to-end operating platform, Rialto, which supports the full life cycle of the business customer, from initial quote to service activation.
BroadCloud effectively serves all target market segments from micro businesses, to SMBs to large enterprises. Whether a business is in a single location or thousands of locations, including home workers and mobile employees, the BroadCloud service provides seamless UC service to everyone.
CBM: What are the key benefits of BroadCloud for users?
MW: IDC predicts that the Unified Communications market will reach £17 Billion by the year 2018. The rapid migration of enterprises to cloud-delivered UC solutions gives resellers the opportunity to rapidly deliver a complete range of UC services that address the needs of businesses of varying size across a variety of market segments.
Businesses and end-users can leverage BroadSoft’s cloud delivery model to access UC-One, a full UC experience that enhances productivity for the increasingly mobile workforce by making voice, video, business directories, call logs and instant messaging and presence available on a single application – regardless of the user’s preferred mobile device (employer-provided or BYOD) type of connectivity (mobile, fixed-line, etc.) or type of communication service connectivity (hosted or premise-based PBX).
UC-One’s intuitive, user-friendly client runs on the most popular platforms for computers, smartphones and tablets, and delivers all the UC functions from a single app. Designed with the user-experience in mind, the UC-One client makes it easy to access telephony features, send and receive IMs, and collaborate with voice, video, and desktop sharing to improve worker productivity and streamline business operations.
CBM: How can resellers get involved in selling BroadCloud (Who can they buy from and what training/accreditation is required etc.?)
BD: As BroadSoft’s longest standing partner in the UK, Wavenet are bringing full UC to the UK with our launch of BroadCloud CloudPBX to our Channel Partners, for both of our Reseller and Dealer Channels. With Wavenet’s comprehensive service wrap that includes BroadCloud, Connectivity, CPE and other related services we are confident that we can continue to provide a premium service to our partners and are currently on-boarding businesses looking to provide a carrier grade UC platform with Hosted PBX to their customers.
Wavenet have worked closely with BroadSoft to design and bring multiple levels of training and accreditations to our resellers, from Online Training Courses to Face-to-Face Boot camps that enable our Channel Partners rapid go to market support and collateral. Both Mike and I are excited to be at the Comms Business Summit South later this year to introduce BroadCloud to resellers at the show and let them get hands-on with some of the innovative new services that are part of BroadCloud including Examinet and PacketSmart.