So Cisco is buying Broadsoft. This will effect so many other companies that I hope I hit them all.
Phone/handset vendors will likely be impacted because Cisco sells handsets – and likely will want to sell more. So Avaya, Mitel, Polycom, Grandstream, Yealink will all have impacted sales. Now it make take time for that to happen (2019, since the deal doesn’t close until 2018) – and the vendors could spend more MDF and reduce prices to keep sales volumesup, but we’ll see.
What does this deal say about stand-alone softswitches? What does the runway look like for GENBAND, Metaswitch and Sangoma (FreePBX)? Remember that Oracle bought Tekelec and Sonos acquired Taqua. The number of customers for telecom vendors is shrinking, not growing. Consolidation does that. It means less customers to sell too. Less revenue which results in less R&D, which results in being acquired, forgotten and beaten by an upstart.
Edgewater will be impacted. Cisco would like to sell more IADs and VoIP gear (at the expense of Edgewater). Cisco is losing gear sales to white-box SD-WAN sales. This buy may be a way to shore up some gear sales that are slipping.
Also, Edgewater has been tied to Broadsoft, working hard on inter-operability and cross-marketing. [Edgewater Networks Announces SD-WAN Optimized for BroadSoft Platforms for #BSFTConnections2017] If Cisco gives preference to Cisco IAD (or even zero term leasing or financing), Edgewater (and ADTRAN) may lose sales.
Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and like aren’t worried; they are big Cisco customers. This will be business as normal. It’s the smaller ITSPs. The stand-alone BSFT powered ITSPs are all in Phoenix looking for answers. There will be none. It is too soon. They did waste a trip though. All that way to get blind-sided by this news would piss me off.
SIDE NOTE from PHOENIX:
SVP at Cisco thinks service providers will adopt Spark. Not likely.
Comments like that make me wonder how bad Microsoft Skype4Biz/Teams was crushing Cisco in the enterprise/Fortune 5000 space. How much adoption did Spark really have?
It makes me wonder if Cisco only sees the Duopoly. If so , the other 300+ BSFT customers are in for a world of hurt.
This acquisition will either accelerate consolidation as the BSFT powered ITSPs try to get big enough to make a point – or it goes the other way and stalls consolidation for a while.
For certain, this disrupts things for now. People will have to adjust to the news quick and adapt.