There is no strategy. About 6 months after the closing of the deal, there will be an L1/L2 offsite to discuss strategy. By the time the All-Hands is done, there will be more talk about the strategy but the execution will be delayed at which point the BU's top dog will move to another position in San Jose and into another BU altogether. The new BU leader will talk about strategy and will pull together the L1s and L2s for another offsite and will not stop talking about how wonderful the offsite was while presenting a confusing deck of PowerPoint slides with gawd awful graphics that try to explain the strategy as pillars of the BU at the next All-Hands. The strategy will still be clear as mud and the BU Leader will solicit questions for the next All-Hands which will be in the form of a Strategy Q&A where the L1s will respond to each question with a canned/scripted response to "drive" the strategy....at which point the strategy will be so old and stale that it is irrelevant because the BU is flailing and gasping for breath and showing very poor numbers for 5 straight quarters..... and this will call for another discussion about strategy which will spawn another offsite....and so on ad nauseum or until Chuck and the ELT run out of patience and systematically close the BU using a clever euphemism like "Limited Restructuring" so it won't sound as bad as "lay offs".
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I think you guys miss the point of the acquisition.. They got broadsoft to fix a huge issue with Spark. The terrible Telephony features. They are getting beat left and right in deals where clients want to move off of premises call manager to a cloud solution. The vendors like Ring Central or 8X8 or Fuze are winning them all. If you check Gartner for the latest UCCAS magic quadrant Cisco is not even on the list since they are not even close on cloud Telephony.
Do i think it will work? Maybe.. But knowing cicso's horrible ability to integrate tech acquisitions in collab (uh have we seen anything out of the acano acquisition ?other than the meeting server , that is really a painted acano box) I see at least 18 months to 2 years before any sort of broadsoft build into the spark cloud.
It's about cloud and not legacy products. It's about future and Avaya stands no where.
BroadSoft's cloud business applications and platforms are available through more than 450 service providers in 80 countries. The vendor currently has over 19 million business subscribers.
There is no question of using Avaya's session manager...... Cisco and BroadSoft will provide a comprehensive SaaS portfolio of cloud-based unified communications, collaboration, and contact center software solutions and services for customers of all sizes.
Both Cisco and Broadsoft's share rose after this deal.
Thanks for taking my reply to an earlier thread and posting it as it's own topic.
This was posted in Avaya thread, completely on point:
Another terrible acquisition by Cisco, and another discolored, ugly square in their quilt. They couldn't integrate with Broadsoft (or anyone) before, and they won't be able to now. True interoperability happens through SIP, and Avaya has been doing that for years with Session Manager and multivendor environments including Cisco and Broadsoft. This doesn't do anything to give Cisco a leg up, in fact, Cisco and Broadsoft customers will now need to buy an Avaya Session Manager get the two systems to talk to each other. So, thank you Cisco for the increased revenue!