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Telstra deploying BroadSoft Business apps for unified cloud comms

Telstra is partnering with BroadSoft to power its IP telephony, digital office, and SIP connectivity solutions for customers across its cloud-based unified communications portfolio.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Telstra has announced entering a multi-year deal with global cloud-based telecommunications software provider BroadSoft to provide unified communication, collaboration, and contact centre services to Australian enterprise customers.

Under the deal, the BroadSoft Business suite of cloud-based unified communications applications will be deployed across Telstra's IP Telephony (TIPT), Digital Office Technology (DOT), and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Connect solutions.

"Our strategic relationship with BroadSoft enables customers to implement high-powered cloud communication and collaboration tools that enhance mobility, teamwork, and customer engagement in their business," Michelle Bendschneider, executive director of Global Products at Telstra, said.

"Utilising BroadSoft technology, Telstra can offer our customers the opportunity to reduce hardware costs, as everything is hosted in the cloud, while also helping businesses increase productivity.

"Employees will be able to connect with their teams, as well as customers, from anywhere they're connected to the internet and at any time, providing real-time connection and premium customer service."

TIPT is a fully managed cloud service providing medium and large enterprises with a unified communication solution supporting voice, video, messaging, mobility, and collaboration, while DOT provides for smaller businesses by offering a hosted on-premises IP calling solution across mobile, landline, and broadband connections.

SIP Connect provides customers with voice and data by shifting them from legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN) and integrated services digital network (ISDN) services over to the National Broadband Network (NBN) or the Telstra Next IP network.

BroadSoft said the deal was made "in response to the growing popularity of a mobile workforce across Australian businesses", with Telstra's unified communications solutions experiencing strong growth over the last year.

BroadSoft launched its APAC training and technical support centre in Sydney 10 years ago, which was collocated with its existing R&D centre in Chatswood, and has been partnered with Telstra on telco software since before then.

BroadSoft earlier this year also brought its services to Latin America, launching in Brazil in January in an effort to lead the South American cloud-based unified communications sector. It already had a 75 percent market share of the telco sector in Brazil; globally, the company holds 41 percent market share in providing these solutions to telcos.

"We expect to grow fast [in Brazil] and above average rates in the region due to the political and economic recovery in the country and also due to the size of the market, the largest in Latin America," BroadSoft's sales vice president for the Caribbean and Latin America, Hector Sanchez, said at the time.

"Our software-as-a-service sales model is also ideal for companies that need to modernise their communications set-up without making large capital investments."

Telstra has also been moving further into cloud, acquiring Australian company Kloud in January last year to provide professional and managed services to more than 80 corporate and government customers across Australia and Asia-Pacific, as well as supplying solutions for productivity, identity, security, application development, and cloud infrastructure for enterprise cloud applications.

Telstra continued expanding these services by acquiring Readify, a developer of Microsoft software applications, in July to bolster its cloud offerings; and it also acquired unified communications solutions and contact centre provider North Shore Connections back in August 2013.

Last May, Telstra flagged the importance in securing multi-cloud services, calling this "critical" to its overarching strategy, by entering a partnership with hybrid cloud security startup vArmour. The partnership allowed Telstra to add another layer of security solutions to its enterprise managed services portfolio.

Telstra earlier this month told ZDNet that it is sticking to cloud connectivity as a service provider, rather than building out its own large-scale cloud offering.

"We looked at ourselves basically as what we really were and said, 'You know, what we're really good at is connectivity'," Jim Fagan, Telstra's director of global platforms, said.

"We're really good at governance and security and frameworks around that -- and we're also really good at actually managing services.

"All of that really should be the core of our cloud strategy."

In that vein, Telstra unveiled its business multi-cloud connecting solution a year ago to support the use of hybrid cloud services Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Office365, VMware vCloud, and IBM SoftLayer. The solution, called Cloud Gateway, allows customers to connect directly to multiple public cloud environments via Telstra's IP network.

Telstra also invested in Chinese cloud company Qiniu in January last year.

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