Industry giant Cisco has swooped on BroadSoft, snatching the hosted comms colossus for $1.9bn in a deal that gives Cisco a ready-made route into the SME sector via channel partners. "Together, Cisco and BroadSoft will deliver a robust suite of collaboration capabilities across every market segment," said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM of Cisco's Applications Business Group.
"We believe that our combined offers, from Cisco's collaboration technology for enterprises to BroadSoft's suite for small and medium businesses delivered through Service Providers will give customers more choice and flexibility."
BroadSoft President and CEO Michael Tessler added: "As businesses continue to move toward the cloud in search of simplicity and speed, joining Cisco will allow us to deliver best-in-class collaboration tools and services.
"BroadSoft's hosted offerings, sold through the service providers and aimed at small and medium businesses, are complementary to Cisco's on-premises and enterprise-centric HCS offerings.
"Together, we can inspire teams to create, collaborate and perform in ways never before imagined."
The acquisition combines BroadSoft's cloud voice and contact centre solutions with Cisco's meetings, hardware and services portfolio.
Rob Salvagno, VP of Cisco Corporate Development, added: "Acquisitions continue to be a core part of our innovation strategy and over the past two years have helped Cisco accelerate or enter areas such as IoT, application intelligence, AI, hyper convergence and SD-WAN.
"With the addition of BroadSoft we expect to accelerate the pace of innovation across our entire collaboration portfolio."
The acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of 2018.
On completion BroadSoft employees will join Cisco's Unified Communications Technology Group led by Vice President and General Manager Tom Puorro, under the Applications Group led by Trollope.