Large Enterprises Move Toward the Cloud with BroadSoft

We often talk about the sweet spot in the market for hosted solutions being the SMB and more specifically businesses with less than 100 employees. However, over the past 18-24 months there have been an increasing number of large enterprises, including multinationals that have started to migrate UC solutions to the public and private cloud. In October 2013, I attended BroadSoft Connections in San Diego. During the course of two days, there were two customer discussions that stood out from the rest because of their size and deployment models—Australia Department of Defence (DoD) and the American Red Cross. The Australian DoD and American Red Cross are good representations of this trend, and of BroadSoft, specifically, winning large enterprise deals with its service provider partners.

DEDICATED DEPLOYMENT WITH LARGE GOVERNMENT AGENCY

In March, Telstra Business Systems won a large contract to completely overhaul the Australia DoD’s communication network that supports 150,000 users. Telstra will be ripping out over 470 PBXs (multiple carriers, multiple vendors) and replacing them with six BroadWorks systems spread across its network. Unlike typical multi-tenant hosted deployments of BroadWorks, this will be dedicated for the DoD and managed by Telstra. Because of the sensitive nature of the Department of Defence and the sheer size it will take three to four years to fully implement the new system.

With such a large deployment there are numerous challenges. One of the most interesting ones is the role of legacy systems. Because of security requirements and differences between classified and unclassified voice communications in a defense agency deployment, Telstra will be maintaining some legacy systems alongside the BroadWorks platforms. Another important challenge was getting past the lack of knowledge of BroadSoft within the DoD. Since BroadSoft is not an enterprise vendor, this is not a shocking discovery. However, this deal illustrates operators’ ability, in partnership with BroadSoft, to overcome this and move forward. The key to this deal is Telstra’s trusted relationship with the DoD that includes the technical sales team moving over to the implementation side to provide consistency with the project. Telstra had to overcome different corporate cultures within the DoD, along with a variety of stakeholders with different ideas of what a new system should entail.

AMERICAN RED CROSS UTILIZING VERIZON VCE

The American Red Cross is a highly distributed agency with HQ in Washington DC and offices spread throughout the US; the agency fills a broad set of needs including blood collection, humanitarian services, and certification classes. It works with a variety of different agencies includes FEMA and the Department of Homeland Defense. With all this comes a vast set of communication requirements.

Two years ago the agency started implementing a new IT model, moving to an opex model that ultimately moves functions to the cloud. Getting all offices and users on a single infrastructure was the goal of its One Red Cross mission. Nothing exemplifies this better than voice, with the American Red Cross

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Copyright © 2013 by Infonetics Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

BROADSOFT AND LARGE ENTERPRISES

operating over 200 different voice platforms supporting several thousand end-users (including hosted services based on BroadWorks at some locations). Consider every Red Cross site had its own PBX, e-mail server, and call center. Operating a single infrastructure and reducing costs was imperative.

The American Red Cross had a long standing relationship with Verizon and went forward with them on moving their voice to the cloud. Verizon put forth several options to the Red Cross before finally hitting on the right solution, Virtual Communications Express (VCE), which is based on BroadSoft’s BroadCloud IP PBX service. The key for the Red Cross was the simplicity and flexibility of VCE. The American Red Cross has hundreds of field offices, many with only 2-3 employees and few resources and little IT expertise, so keeping it simple was very important. With the implementation of VCE, some users just want a deskphone, others just a softphone, and some a mix. Additionally, the Red Cross needs flexibility to spike up and down users during emergency scenarios when there is an influx of volunteers that need phone capabilities. Verizon’s ability to fluctuate service in those situations was highly appealing to the Red Cross.

The transformation for the American Red Cross is a multi-faceted, multi-year project. For IM, presence, and e-mail, it has migrated to Office 365. And following the move to Verizon VCE for voice, it will determine its call center transformation to the cloud.

BOTTOM LINE

As large enterprises move toward the cloud with telephony and UC solutions, there are a number of options. Verizon through its VCE service is tapping into this potential through its national account team, which is an advantage others can’t easily replicate. Larger providers have multiple solutions, and it is a challenge to find the right fit for a given opportunity. For the American Red Cross deal, Verizon presented 3-4 solutions before putting forth VCE, which was a good fit.

However, public cloud and multi-tenant solutions aren’t for all large enterprises. Many are implementing private cloud solutions with system integrators and large operators such as Verizon, AT&T, Orange Business Services, Telefonica, and BT based on vendor solution such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Unify. BroadWorks was designed from the ground up to be highly scalable for carrier deployments and is well suited for large enterprises such as the Australian DoD. In these cases, BroadSoft needs a strong advocate partner such as Telstra that will actively put forth BroadWorks in either a private or public cloud deployment.

Diane MyersPrincipal Analyst, VoIP and IMSInfonetics Researchdiane@infonetics.com

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Copyright © 2013 by Infonetics Research, Inc. All rights reserved.