BroadSoft and Microsoft announce hosted UC alliance

Piling on to a stack of announcements this week at its annual users' conference, BroadSoft announced the general availability of a hosted unified communications services for businesses, based on Microsoft software.

The BroadSoft/Microsoft solution is built on Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) version 4.5 and integrated with BroadSoft's BroadWorks platform. Since it is a hosted offering, businesses can get unified communications without the fixed capital cost of servers and software, and without the dedicated operational costs of maintaining them.

BroadSoft and Microsoft are underlining the ability to "enhance business processes" by being able to tie in vanilla UC features (i.e. IM, email, phone, video) to business process software such as CRM, accounting and enterprise resource planning. 

It will be interesting to see how this announcement plays out both to BroadSoft customers and Microsoft's favorite UC partner Nortel.  Microsoft's hosted solution first turned up on Nortel hardware, and Nortel has enjoyed a most-favored UC partner status in larger integration deals.

For more:
- Microsoft's press release on working with Broadsoft.

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