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BroadSoft is enhancing its UC-One unified communications platform to enable service providers to offer the company’s UC services via the cloud and to better secure employees’ mobile phones.
BroadSoft officials unveiled the new offerings Oct. 17 during the company’s annual BroadSoft Connections event in San Diego. The announcements came a year after the vendor first introduced the UC-One platform and a day after video conferencing technology vendor Polycom said its lineup of VXX Business Media Phones will interoperate with BroadSoft’s UC service.
The company rolled out UC-One in October 2012, with officials saying the goal of the platform was to give service provides a single platform they could leverage to design and introduce communications offerings to a wide range of end users. The platform would help reduce complexity and make it easier for providers to offer integrated UC solutions to their customers.
The new offerings will only add to what the service providers can do, according to BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler.
“These new enhancements demonstrate our commitment to investing in all of the platform’s elements so that our service provider customers can extend their hosted voice solutions to full unified communications,” Tessler said in a statement.
The company’s BroadWorks Collaborate gives service providers a new model for delivering UC services. With the new solution, providers can make the services available via server software that is run within the provider’s own network. It complements BroadSoft’s BroadCloud, which is a fully hosted cloud platform, according to company officials.
BroadSoft also is enhancing its Xtended solution, which is aimed at encouraging third-party application developers to make their software, systems and devices interoperate and integrate with BroadSoft’s communications solutions. Officials unveiled the Xtended Dialer for Chrome application that enables users to access and manage their BroadSoft UC services from a Chrome browser. Through the application, users can search and click-to-call their BroadWorks and Google enterprise contacts and click-to-call numbers found on Web pages or Web-based applications.
In addition, customers will be able to see notifications of incoming calls displayed on their devices and to see their call histories.
Through UC-One, service providers also will now be able to help businesses offer greater security in their bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies by enabling end users to separate business and personal voice and UC services—including business and personal contacts, call logs and chat sessions—on their mobile devices.
BYOD has created security and management headaches for organizations’ IT departments that are wrestling with ensuring that corporate networks and data are secure while employees use the same devices for work and their personal lives. BroadSoft’s BroadTouch Business Communicator creates a secure environment on a device for business software and data, and which is controlled by the enterprise.
In addition, service providers can now access Xcelerate, BroadSoft’s redesigned customer portal. Over the last 12 months, the company has doubled the portal’s resources around sales, lead generation and fulfillment, and has redesigned the portals format and improved its search capabilities.