Cisco Systems is buying telecommunications software company Broadsoft Inc. for about $1.9 billion, including debt.
The company announced Monday it will offer $55 a share, a 2 percent premium over Broadsoft’s most recent closing price.
The deal gives Cisco more clout in selling unified communications software to large telecoms. Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Broadsoft makes cloud-based communications software.
“Together, Cisco and BroadSoft will deliver a robust suite of collaboration capabilities across every market segment,” said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Applications Business Group. “We believe that our combined offers, from Cisco’s collaboration technology for enterprises to BroadSoft’s suite for small and medium businesses delivered through Service Providers will give customers more choice and flexibility.”
Last week, Cisco said it was buying Silicon Valley machine learning startup Perspica, its 200th acquisition.
“Cisco recently marked a significant milestone with our 200th acquisition. Acquisitions continue to be a core part of our innovation strategy and over the past two years have helped Cisco accelerate or enter areas such as IoT, application intelligence, AI, hyperconvergence and SD-WAN,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development. “With the addition of BroadSoft, we expect to accelerate the pace of innovation across our entire collaboration portfolio.”
The acquisitions continue Cisco’s move from its legacy switches and routers and into software and services.
“Cisco is committed to delivering the next generation of collaboration experiences to all workers across every room, desk, pocket and application. These experiences include meetings, as well as messaging, calling capabilities and contact center touchpoints. As our customers continue to transition to the cloud, they are demanding deployment flexibility across all of these experiences. This requires collaboration solutions across all workloads on premises and in the cloud,” Salvagno wrote in a blog post.
“That’s why today we announced a definitive agreement to acquire BroadSoft.”
Cisco operates one of its largest corporate campuses in RTP.
