BroadSoft has acquired Phoenix, Ariz.-based iLinc Communications as a move to enhance its portfolio by adding iLinc’s Web collaboration tools. iLinc’s collaboration features will become BroadCloud Web Collaboration — a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that extends BroadSoft’s unified communications (UC) services.
BroadSoft’s customer base includes 450 global telecommunications service providers. The latest collaboration tools are designed to give these customers a higher-margin Web collaboration service as an alternative to reselling other Web collaboration services. The new service also allows service providers to tightly integrate collaboration with existing UC capabilities (also offered by BroadSoft), thereby extending the service provider’s brand value, increasing customer loyalty and reducing churn.
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Commenting in a statement, BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler said, “Whether it is through strategic acquisitions or in-house development, we remain committed to offering an extensive, innovative range of unified communications services that empower global service providers. With BroadCloud Web Collaboration our global service provider customers can now offer a branded, comprehensive web collaboration service at a competitive price with the goal of earning higher margins versus reselling other services.”
Following up on the announcement, we had interviewed Leslie Ferry, VP of marketing at BroadSoft, who added, “Demand for this service is high. Service providers are very excited about integrating this as a white-labeled service in addition to selling other branded services. The features are at parity with other services and it can easily scale so it is useful for a handful [of concurrent users] up to a larger enterprise with a thousand persons online.”
She continued by saying that the existing service is very popular in education today and that service providers can use this collaboration feature to target specific vertical markets. Ferry also noted that the iLinc brand will continue to be sold to the enterprise market through the existing iLinc sales force.
