BroadSoft CEO: "Bullish" on 2009

This week FierceVoIP talked to BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler about the Sylantro acquisition, managing three distinct product lines, competitors in the VoIP applications space, and what prospects for 2009 look like.

"We have a strong position in the [VoIP applications server] market," said Tessler. "That position got stronger with the Sylantro customer base... It's a good synergistic fit, not only by adding the customer base, but having the ability for us to work with the customers we've acquired."

Since many of the customers are Tier 1 service providers, they are "pretty demanding," and BroadSoft has to make sure they can support both the existing in-place platforms and the customer. "We've moved over the technology functions, the people who were doing [support] at Sylantro," Tessler said. "We have all the capability Sylantro has, we have those employees. [Sylantro] customers shouldn't be worried, the support lines are there, all the crew is there."

With the acquisition of Sylantro, BroadSoft has three distinct product lines to support: its own, the GENBAND M6 applications server, and Sylantro's. While BroadSoft would like to get everyone onto one platform at some point, "that road is probably long," Tessler stated. "One problem you have in terms of acquiring a like competitor, you can't do a deep dive on integration until you close. Right now, we're matching platform to platform, what is on the roadmaps, what is needed. We've already done outreach to [Sylantro] customers, understanding their needs."

Right now, BroadSoft has to work with Sylantro customers in a "collaborative fashion" to put together a roadmap for additional features, and, ultimately, to move to a consolidated platform. "Clearly as a business, we'd like to converge those platforms, but that is a little early right now," Tessler said.

"One of the good things [we] learned through process of acquiring the GENBAND server, is [working] through [the acquisition] process... working with customers, locking down the roadmap, integrating the teams," said Tessler. "We were able to reuse the learnings in the Sylantro acquisition. We're in day one or two of that now, we're just starting process of collaborating with customers, understand what they were doing, and working with them on the future."

While BroadSoft has bought its most prominent competitor, it doesn't have a free ride ahead. "I wish I could say there's no competition, but there is," said Tessler. "It depends upon the market segment, geography. The Comverse guys are still around with Netcentrix. In the U.S. market, it's MetaSwitch with MetaSphere. On the consumer side we see the softswitch IMS core vendors, all the big switch manufacturers have their feature server platforms. There's a fair amount of competition. You see regional players in Asia, in Europe."

As an independent and pure-play applications server company, Tessler says BroadSoft is in a "pretty strong" position, with manufacturers sometimes competing with them and sometime acting as a channel to resell BroadSoft. "The key message is we've been able to build a very strong brand and use that to consolidate the space," he said. "We're looking forward to integrating the Sylantro team. We'll work with work with customers on their plans."

Looking to the future, Tessler is optimistic for the new year. "We're pretty excited and pretty bullish about 2009," he said. "What we've seen are carriers well underway in TDM projects and they are not going to stop. There's enough economics to make those transitions, and we don't see that changing.

"Will some spending slow down? Clearly, but that doesn't mean that [next generation network purchases] are going to stop. Every carrier is well under way [to NGN]. BroadSoft is active in 60-plus markets and there's a lot of transformation going on. We don't see that going down."