It’s been a fascinating day here at Connections with some interesting announcements from BroadSoft. Two in particular have caught my eye.

The first is the announcement from BroadSoft of their launch of “UC One” – a service offering bringing together a number of features from their portfolio under a single brand. I think this is a reaction from BroadSoft to the perceived Lync threat – the entire industry is talking about Lync at the moment, although from a telephony perspective, industry analyst Matt Townend recently blogged that Lync appears to be making less of an impact than it would seem.

There’s been some interesting commentary from a number of attendees covering the whole spectrum of opinions, but for me the key point from this announcement is that not all of the services that form part of the portfolio are operating in Europe. However, whether you take advantage of the cloud offerings from BroadSoft or not, there’s plenty of new features to keep people happy including some UI enhancements to the client applications.

What’s of more interest to me personally is the announcement of BroadSoft’s Xtended Connect service. Partnering with Intellipeer this is a particularly powerful service that allows BroadSoft customers to connect to each other globally over IP, allowing HD voice and video calls to be passed between networks. HD voice (using the G.722 codec) is a huge step up from the PSTN and one of those features that sets VoIP apart from traditional phone systems. Creating a single, larger network of interconnected service providers can only be a good thing in my opinion. I’ll be spending some time tomorrow looking into the service and finding out how it works, both from a commercial and technical sense.