Cisco Unveils “What’s Next” at Connections 2018

In my last blog, I told you we would have lots of exciting announcements at Connections 2018. Well, I’m happy to share some of the highlights of today’s exciting news with you.

Strong execution

The past year has been very strong. We remained focused on execution and business results even as we worked on the integration within Cisco and developing new offers. This is thanks to you – our service provider partners – who continue to lead the market with over 65% share of cloud calling. And our Cisco BroadCloud for Carrier offer has seen a 56% growth in users year over year. UC-One SaaS has been a great success as well, with more than 65 partners already deploying, and subscriptions doubling month over month.

New opportunities

Small businesses have led the adoption to cloud for many reasons, including cost and flexibility. This market is well covered by service providers. However, the mid and large segments are much less penetrated, and are beginning to make the cloud transition as part of their overall digital transformation strategies. These organizations have dispersed workforces and need flexible, reliable, and secure enterprise grade cloud calling – fully integrated with collaboration.

With over 250M addressable premises-based lines worldwide, the Cloud Calling opportunity for this market segment is expected to grow at 26% per year, and reach $7.5B in annual SaaS revenues by 2022. This opens up a huge new opportunity for us!

New offer for Service Providers

To address the needs of these larger segments, today we announced a brand-new offer which includes BroadCloud Cloud Calling, the full Webex Collaboration suite, and Cisco devices.

What’s more, this offer is now included in the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan, making it easy for service providers to sell and for customers to buy.

The Flex Plan offer includes the following components:

A premium enterprise calling subscription

Access to all group features

Cisco phones, headsets, and video endpoints

and Webex Teams

And, Webex Meetings and Customer Journey Platform can be added as optional components.

The offer will be co-branded, with service providers branding the calling application while the collaboration applications will carry the Cisco Webex brand. I feel this a highly effective combination for our market.

The Cisco BroadCloud Flex Plan is available today in the U.S., and by the end of the calendar year in all BroadCloud markets. In early 2019, we’ll offer Cisco BroadWorks in the Flex Plan, and our country coverage will continue to expand as well.  We’ve already soft-launched the offer with a few partners, and one partner said:

“Orange Business Services is delighted to continue to partner with Cisco in the growing mid-market and large enterprise Collaboration market segment. We like the simplicity of the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan subscription model. It allows us to offer one package that includes all the essential communications ingredients needed by these enterprises. Our customers no longer want to deal with the complexity and costs of on-premises technology, and many are ready to move their technology to the cloud. We now have an opportunity to help them through this transition, while providing them with the financial and business advantages of the Cisco leading edge solution set.” Sam Nchinda, VP Orange Business Services.

Helping you go to market

Lastly, to help our partners succeed in this untapped market, we’re also expanding our Digital Accelerator initiative (previously known as Powered by BroadSoft) to help you deliver turnkey marketing and sales assets, specifically tailored to these offers.

I want to end by saying thank you

It’s been an amazing year and we’ve accomplished a great deal.  I believe the combination of these new offers and the innovations we’re bringing to our portfolio will help you to continue to create competitive differentiation, and address larger segments of the market with targeted and high value solutions.

See Cloud Calling and read our press release to learn more.