Cisco receives antitrust clearance for pending BroadSoft purchase
Cisco recently finalized its acquisition of BroadSoft, thereby sealing the $1.9 billion deal. Paying $55 per share, Cisco aims for the investment to give its cloud strategy and collaboration portfolio a boost.
As part of the acquisition, originally announced last October, Cisco will add BroadSoft’s cloud calling and contact center solutions to its calling, meetings, messaging, customer care, hardware endpoints and service portfolio. The company said it intends to serve businesses of all sizes with the assistance of its VAR and service provider partners.
“Together, Cisco and BroadSoft will deliver a robust suite of collaboration capabilities across every market segment,” said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Applications Business Group, in a statement when the acquisition was first announced last October. “We believe that our combined offers, from Cisco’s collaboration technology for enterprises to BroadSoft’s suite for small and medium businesses delivered through Service Providers will give customers more choice and flexibility.”
BroadSoft has partnerships with more than 450 telecom carriers in 80 countries, according to Rob Salvagno, vice president of corporate business development at Cisco. Broadsoft is expected to continue working as a separate company during the transition process with Cisco. Former BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler and staff will join Cisco’s Unified Communications Technology Group, led by Vice President and General Manager Tom Puorro. Cisco said it expects BroadSoft’s common stock to be delisted from the NASDAQ stock market on February 12.
Cisco had to receive antitrust clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to complete the deal, which had been held in pending status before getting the green light.
Broadsoft released its financial results for the third quarter of 2017 last November. Total revenue increased 9% year-over-year to $91.5 million. Net loss for the third quarter of 2017 was $2.7 million, or 9 cents per basic and diluted common share.
The acquisition of Broadsoft follows Cisco launching its own open and production-grade container platform. Built on Kubernetes, the Cisco Container Platform can assist with deploying and managing virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal, both on-premises and in the cloud.
