Indeed, the rumors came true rather quickly. Cisco has announced an agreement to acquire BroadSoft.
Cisco will be paying $55 per share in cash, which works out to $1.9B net of cash. They’ll be combining BroadSoft’s UC platform with their own collaboration capabilities, taking aim at everything from the small business to the multinational enterprise. BroadSoft’s technology underlies a significant fraction of service provider voice offerings across the industry, but especially in the US.
The deal is expected to close in Q1 of next year, assuming the regulatory review goes well. When it does, BroadSoft’s employee base will be tucked into Cisco’s UC Technology Group under Tom Pourro, which lies within the Applications Business Group led by Rowan Trollope.
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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Telecom Equipment · Unified Communications
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Any time Cisco makes an acquisition, the industry dies a little.
Indeed. Though I will give them one thing: they always seem to snatch up some of my favorite up and coming brands, so either they have good taste or I have bad taste. Either way, they are buried quickly thereafter.
Spark, HCS, CallManager, BroadWorks, BroadCloud, Webex – what a cluster!
Grandstream, Polycom, Mitel, Avaya, Edgewater and others will end of losing on this deal.
I wonder how Cisco will handle being a white-label ITSP (BroadCloud). Verizon, XO and others depend on it.