Broadsoft in Competition With its Clients

Interesting news from ADTRAN and Broadsoft: the launch of ADTRAN’s ProCloud UC powered by BroadSoft (BSFT). , so MSPs can white-label BSFT through ADTRAN.

"The addition of the BroadCloud call control platform to ADTRAN’s ProCloud Subscription Services Suite enables Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners to expand their cloud-based unified communications (UC) offerings." Truth be told if they wanted to white label it, there are a dozen options including Coredial, Momentum, PBX-Change, et al.

It seems more and more BSFT is competing directly with its customers in much he same way that ILECs and cablecos do. That won't be good long term for anyone. There are too many players in the UC game; most play the price game. Hard to compete with $15 per seat though from the manufacturer.

While I understand that BSFT has to sell seats to survive, doing it at the expense of its clients is crazy. Consider that there are about 2 million seats that are sitting out there unused and BSFT is NOT collecting maintenance on. Consider that as BSFT lowers the price to $15, its very own customers cannot compete so more seats end up unsold and maintenance payments slow down. Can BSFT make enough money selling directly to cover the losses soon to be suffered by its clients?

What type of VoIP is selling today? Most of the VoIP market is selling SIP trunks to replace PRIs and POTS lines. Hosted seats are tough to sell. Right now the UC market is shifting to Workflow and other siloed comms platforms like Slack or Skype4B. At Enterprise Connect, the keynotes were from Amazon (who launched a cloud contact center offering) and Twilio, not AT&T, not Avaya and not BSFT. What does that say about the future of UC?

One thing to think about is to "Give your employees less fragmented enterprise communications if you want them to collaborate better. Make the desktop more like the smartphone and enterprise experiences as good as consumer technology," writes David Carr at Forbes. Users are self selecting apps for comms including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, twitter DM and more. Most of it is outside the corporate umbrella. Many reasons for that, including you communicate with people in the easiest manner possible to get a response.

We'll see how this ends up.