BroadSoft Secrets Revealed: The Big One
By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner
By 2001, BroadSoft had grown into a thought leader for VoIP applications. We had secured funding, had a working product, and won a few smaller service providers. Things were going well and we were happy with our progress, but we hadn’t made any headway with a big name service provider. Around this time, Verizon put out an RFI/RFP for a set of VoIP solutions. We were very excited to receive it, but it included solutions for just about all of their voice products - a massive undertaking for any size company.
I remember attending the RFI/RFP vendor kick off meeting. Seth Noone, who was our first sales person at BroadSoft, and myself attended. Both of us were in our early thirties, but we looked ten years younger. We walked into the room - I think it was in New York - and there were probably 150 people in attendance. We walked by the 35 person contingent from Nortel and the 25 person contingent from Lucent, and heard their snickers. Clearly, they didn’t think we had a chance and thought we were wasting our time. Their arrogance of incumbency has stuck with me ever since.
We responded to the RFI/RFP with 5 or so partners and also did a standalone response. A lot of work went into the response. We fine tuned our answers, ensuring that we put our best foot forward. We were very proud of our work, but alas, Verizon never did award any business based on that RFI/RFP.
One of the things that did come out of the activity was a request from Verizon’s innovation team to help them put advanced services on top of their existing switching infrastructure. The idea was to take our platform - BroadWorks - and make it work on top of a class 5 switch. I was reluctant to pursue this, since it was a one off just for Verizon and not really reusable by other service providers. It was clearly a tangent, and would require a significant portion of our development team to work on it.
After some long deliberations, I was convinced by Mike’s “You never know” philosophy that we should do it. I always delegated things I didn’t think were good ideas to my brother, so I asked Sam to work on it. His team jointly created a proprietary interface that was part SIP and part AIN (the protocol for building apps on top of a class 5 switch). He gave it a snazzy name - “INSC - intelligent Networking Service Control”. Most of the simple features - like sim ring, call screening, etc. - on BroadWorks were made to work with the protocol.
Verizon launched the service and gave it the name iobi. Here’s the link to the Wiki if you’re interested. It wasn’t really a commercial success and we really didn’t make any significant revenue on the product, but one thing it did do was build trust with Verizon. When the next RFP came around, we were successful in influencing the solution architecture and approach. BroadWorks was chosen as the core VoIP solution, beating out the likes of Nortel and Lucent. Ultimately, we went on to jointly launch offers for consumer, trunking, SMB, enterprise and mobile.
Most of the time side projects are a detriment, but in this case iobi helped establish us as a trusted partner. If we hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have won business at Verizon. The lesson for me was to not immediately dismiss things that aren’t your core focus. It’s always good to think things through and look at them from all angles. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and just do it. As Mike always likes to tell me, you never know what may happen.
