BroadSoft: Acquisition Of Transera Will Drive Higher Margins, Stickiness For Partners

Unified Communications specialist BroadSoft has acquired cloud-based contact center provider Transera, in a move executives say will drive higher margins and improve stickiness for channel partners.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Transera is an application specialist offering multitenant Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) on its own purpose-built software platform, targeting large contact center enterprise customers.

In an interview with CRN, Transera CEO Prem Uppaluru said combining technologies complements and enhances BroadSoft's portfolio for channel partners.

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"While BroadSoft does have a contact center offering, the contact center offering that Transera brings to the table is significantly more feature-rich in terms of reporting, recording, analytics and so on," said Uppaluru, the new general manager and vice president for BroadSoft's Cloud Contact Center. "This puts our channel partners in a significantly better competitive position to offer an end-to-end solution to their customer and make higher-margin revenue, because contact center products generally tend to produce higher-margin revenues and stickier revenues than others, and gets them out of the commodity transport business into value-added applications."

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Analyst firm MarketandMarkets forecasts that the global cloud-based contact center market will grow from $4.6 billion in 2015 to $14.7 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 25 percent. The Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market, which BroadSoft specializes in, is growing at an annual rate of 16 percent, with revenue from UCaaS currently at $4 billion, according to a recent Synergy Research Group report.

Taher Bahbehani, chief marketing officer at BroadSoft, says combining the two complementary technologies opens the door for partners to start selling stronger integrated UC and CC solutions that will boost revenue.

"The channel strategy for the next 12 months is to really leverage the existing channel partners who've been hunting for value-added applications," said Bahbehani.

"We will be working very closely with our partners to help them go attack the opportunities that are there in the contact center market, together with business communications providing end-to-end, full-stack solutions, … giving them higher-margin revenue through the value-added applications," he said.

The vendor will focus on educating its service provider partners on the new capabilities in CC and integrated effectiveness with UC, according to Bahbehani. Since partners will need only minimal new investments, BroadSoft expects partners to reap the benefits of being able to rapidly go to market with the new solutions.

Gaithersburg, Md.-based BroadSoft says the acquisition will contribute around $8 million in revenue to the company in 2016.

The company says the premise contact center market is a $3.3 billion opportunity and BroadSoft aims to drive the transformation of the market to the cloud.

"[Partners] have been asking for it and they've asked BroadSoft overall to take a more [prominent] position in terms of providing unified communications and contact center solutions," said Bahbehani. "The technology of this company and the team that we have acquired is exceptional."

About 60 Transera employees will be joining BroadSoft.