Distributor courts cloud resellers after inking Cisco deal

How Cisco's acquisition of BroadSoft has enabled Nuvias to distribute the vendor giant's UC portfolio

Cisco's acquisition of BroadSoft has enabled Nuvias to snare a unified communications (UC) distribution deal with the vendor giant.

Nuvias has been working with BroadSoft for close to a decade and when Cisco shelled out $1.7bn (£1.3bn) for the telecoms firm, it enabled the distributor to jump in with Cisco in the wash-up.

Cisco's UC portfolio and its recently released open SIP end-points will now be available to UK resellers through Nuvias, with cloud players likely to be heavily targeted.

As Cisco looks to integrate BroadSoft technology into its cloud-based UC offerings, Nuvias will look to leverage its lengthy BroadSoft relationship with a fresh Cisco one.

Steve Harris, EVP unified communications at Nuvias, told CRN: "For us, even after Cisco's acquisition, Broad S oft will continue an open-standard platform, and that has been publicly stated.

"So the logical step to expand our relationship with Broadsoft was to include the Cisco end-points, so that is what has driven the decision for us to start offering these products."

Harris said Cisco tends to operate a very broad approach to its channel and its distributors take on the entire portfolio, without specialism.

"We have reached an agreement with Cisco whereby our focus is purely around UC and SIP end-points. Our customer base is really focused around cloud and UC, where Cisco is looking to increase its share," said Harris.

"After the acquisition of BroadSoft, Cisco is now in a much better position to bundle a lot of its hardware capabilities into this customer base."

Harris said any reseller that is a cloud provider is well placed to work with the distributor on its new Cisco-based offerings.

"We add a lot of value around automation and device management with our proposition for the cloud players and that is something Cisco saw the value in," he added.