Daily Archive

It’s day two of our seventh annual users‘ conference, Connections 2009, and today we raise the curtain on an initiative we’ve been trying to keep under wraps for some time now – the monetization phase of our Xtended program.

The Xtended initiative was launched in 2008 to open up the BroadWorks platform to third-party innovation and the Web 2.0 in particular. We picked the best practices of Web 2.0 – open standards, RESTful APIs, forums, and an online presence for our community in the form of a developer portal and marketplace for them to post their creations. Today, with a developer community of 2,000 strong, we take another big step forward – adding ecommerce functionality to the Xtended marketplace. Now, any BroadSoft-powered operator (more than 450 worldwide by the way) can distribute third-party apps, sourced from the Xtended developer community, in their own custom-branded online store.

Think of it like the Apple App Store for IP Communications apps with a twist. Every BroadWorks-powered service provider can pick and choose from the eCommerce-enabled marketplace and create their own mini app store. This is a big deal not just for service providers that have a new revenue-generating channel, but for consumers and businesses who will have fast, easy access to a diverse array of solutions online and available for download in one click. Plus third-party developers in the Xtended community stand to benefit with online stores where they can shop their apps to more than half-a-billion people.

Several BroadSoft-powered service providers including Comporium,  SimpleSignal, Telesphere and WorldxChange will be launching their apps stores in early 2010. And when they do, a number of developers will be at the ready to hit upload including:

• Spinvox, which offers a ‘Voicemail to Text’ app
• JoeDeveloper whose Quickset Pro application manages a host of call functions such as Sequential Ring, Speed Dial and Remote Office
• Mobile Max’s Enterprise Edition a unified communications client that allows access to all call functions – Do Not Disturb, Call Forward – from a mobile handset

Of course, we think this is game changing – but don’t take our word for it. See for yourself here.