Cisco have reaffirmed its support for BroadWorks, but it has divided opinion in the industry on whether it is the right choice.
The concept of lifetime licenses is becoming increasingly rare in today’s market.
After all, companies like Microsoft are specifically moving away from one-time purchases and are pushing to subscription-based models.
But it is also an acknowledgment that the modern world moves fast, and so trying to keep a lifetime license open for software can prove challenging.
Thankfully, not many UC companies have to contend with this reality.
However, one major player is left with such a legacy decision: Cisco.
Cisco’s Lifetime License with BroadWorks
Cisco’s $1.9 billion purchase of BroadWorks in 2018 carried over the company’s lifetime licenses it had previously offered.
BroadWorks is a carrier-grade, cloud-based unified communications software platform that service providers use to deliver cloud-based calling, messaging, and collaboration services to businesses.
It allows businesses to access a range of communication features from a single, network-based system, including call control, unified messaging, and private voice networking.
UCaaS services based on BroadSoft have been in the market for twenty years, with the average term around ten years.
Many of the former BroadSoft-based UCaaS offers have seen significant success, racking up hundreds of thousands of users and delivering revenue streams into the tens of millions for the service providers concerned.
The margins are as much as 80% because most BroadSoft-based licenses are paid upfront as a one-time cost.
However, Cisco is dwindling its support for the BroadSoft platform, which has seen a steady decline since its acquisition.
Cisco has been pushing more and more for users of its other products to go to Webex, creating migration guides to move from Cisco’s on-premises solutions like Unified Communications Manager (UCM) to Webex.
As a result of this strategy, Cisco has previously said features like extended call center reporting (ECCR) functionality in BroadWorks would be nearing end of life.
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