Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ SVP Cloud Transformation Andrew Pryfogle discusses the benefits of the Broadsoft platform with Evolve IP’s CTO Scott Kinka. Find out more about UCaaS from Scott and the Evolve IP team here: http://evolveip.cloudservicesuniversity.com/
| Andrew: | Okay, on to our next Ask the Experts session. Invited back to the studio yet again, Scott Kinka, CTO of Evolve IP. |
| Scott, welcome man. | |
| Scott: | Pleasure to be here. |
| Andrew: | Good deal. Hey, you’ve been in this UCaaS space a long time. |
| Scott: | Yeah. |
| Andrew: | It’s been an interesting evolution of where things have come from, and where they are going. I want to talk a little bit about platform real quick. You guys made this strategic decision a long time ago to kind of standardize on Broadsoft as your core application and Softswitch architecture. Others have chosen other paths, whether it be Metaswitch, or an open source platform like Freeswitch, or something like that. Lots of different choices. |
| You guys chose Broadsoft. I want to give you an opportunity to kind of speak to, why is that? Why Broadsoft? And why should Partners and customers care about that? | |
| Scott: | Yeah, great question. It’s a polarizing topic amongst those of us who are in the tech community, right? There’s value to each one of the choices that you just mentioned. For us, the initial Broadsoft choice was about … I mean it was 2007 when we were funding the business. 2008 when we put our first customer on switch. And at the time, UCaaS in the cloud meant something completely different than it does today, right? In simplest terms, Broadsoft is the, “Nobody gets fired for IBM” type of choice there. Right? It’s the big Softswitch. It’s the industry standard. They’ve bought most of their competition. There were other names that you heard out there that they have acquired over the years, so it really is the industry standard out there in terms of carrier-class Softswitch. |
| In terms of its use, you’ve got cloud-hosted application providers like Evolve IP on one side. You’ve got the Comcasts’ and the Verizons’ delivering dial tone over your Triple Play and your home off of the same switch. Broadsoft today has roughly 90-million-line equivalence on switch, which would make it the largest PBX manufacturer in the world. | |
| A name nobody’s ever heard of because their customers are carriers, and that’s a logical scenario. To us, it was about being able to build and have support. Not just of the vendor, but also if you think about it, all of the other varying use cases out there create knowledge, mitigation of issues and all of those things. For us, the ability to lean on that community was really important. | |
| We talked in a different segment about sort of the architecture of a Softswitch, and Broadsoft is built in a tiered model. Applications are separated from network services, are separated from third-party application integration, are separated from media, which makes it easy to manage at large scale. That’s really the scenario. Some of the … You mentioned Freeswitch. Asterisk is another. Those are great, flexible platforms to be able to rapidly deploy applications, but there’s a lot of art in being able to get them to scale. There’s argument about an Asterisk machine: Does it handle one or two hundred concurrent calls? Neither number is comfortable for me in terms of scale on one box. | |
| And companies–don’t get me wrong–have done a great job of just building kind of end-tier scale models. All right, if it will deal with two hundred calls, I’ll just jam up eighty of them. You know what I mean? It’s all a matter of your development methodology on that. | |
| I’d say lastly would be the surrounding community. Which is because Broadsoft has really been at this the longest, because it’s built for that eminent scalability. It also has a lot of deployment scenarios. As I said, the Evolve IP is at one end, and the Comcasts’ and Verizons’ with completely different desires, if you will, on the other side. But because of that, there’s a host of people developing for it. | |
| I mentioned in another segment: we count some forty-odd CRM and ERP systems as pre-integrated into our platform. Some of it’s on Evolve IP intellectual property, but a lot of it is just also coming out of that community. It’s an easy way for us to continue to lean on the community from a development effort as well. Has anybody tried to solve this problem? It’s been really a good fit for us and we’ve been able to scale it into multiple locations and serious levels of redundancy. So a choice that’s been good for us, although there’s strengths and weaknesses in every model. | |
| Andrew: | Got it. Very cool man. Well, that breaks it down. I appreciate the detail on that, guys. |
| That’s Scott Kinka. He’s one of the founding members of Evolve IP. There at the beginning when they made the choices around what platforms they would standardize on. CTO of the company. One of the smartest guys I know in this space. | |
| Mr. Kinka, thanks for your time again, bud. | |
| Scott: | Awesome to be here. |
| Andrew: | Guys, make sure you do spend some time at the Evolve IP learning center here at the University. There’s tons of information there that can help you sell more UCaaS, more cloud, and get smarter about how to do all this. So make sure you spend some time. It will be a good investment of your day. Good selling. |
