BroadSoft Acquires Sylantro

BroadSoft Acquires Sylantro

By Greg Galitzine

It’s official.

Gaithersburg, Maryland-based BroadSoft, Inc., today officially announced that it has acquired Campbell, California-based Sylantro Systems Corporation, an erstwhile competitor.

According to BroadSoft president and CEO Michael Tessler, “Sylantro has been a strong competitor of BroadSoft for 10 years. This acquisition further advances our market and innovative leadership position. Sylantro’s solutions, talent and customers complement BroadSoft’s business and enhance our ability to deliver compelling solutions and services to our customers.”

In the official announcement, Marco Limena, president and CEO of Sylantro said, “By joining forces, the two companies are in a position to create a market leading global entity with a shared vision and infrastructure to meet the needs of our valued customers and the challenges of a competitive industry landscape.”

Global is an understatement. As a result of the acquisition, BroadSoft now has development and customer operations centers in Montreal, Canada; Dallas, Texas; Bangalore, India; Sydney, Australia; Belfast, Northern Ireland; and Gaithersburg, Maryland.

BroadSoft announced that it would support Sylantro’s Synergy platform both through its direct sales organization and authorized Sylantro and BroadSoft partners. Synergy is a carrier-grade feature server platform designed to enable voice and Web applications. The platform has been deployed at 95 carriers worldwide including AT&T, China Netcom, KT, Nuvox, QWEST, StarHub, Swisscom, and others.

Sylantro recently made the push into the cloud computing space, announcing an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that essentially declared their Synergy platform compatible with AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

BroadSoft, which a month ago celebrated their 10th anniversary has enjoyed a good run of late. According to the company, in the last five years, annual revenues have grown more than 1,000 percent and the number of employees has increased from 84 to almost 300.

In October, the company announced the general availability of a hosted unified communications service for business, built on the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) version 4.5 and integrated with BroadSoft’s BroadWorks business telephony platform.

And in August, BroadSoft announced it had acquired GENBAND’s M6 Communication Applications Server (formerly VocalData) product line and related customer base. One immediate result of that acquisition was that the number of BroadSoft’s total customer base increased to 435.

BroadSoft serves eight of the top 10 and 14 of the top 25 largest carriers worldwide, including Korea Telecom, KPN, SingTel, Sprint, Telefonica de Espana, Telstra, T-Systems, and Verizon.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.