Cisco acquired BroadSoft Inc. in 2018 and began integrating the product into the company. Nearly all of the core product engineering team stayed with Cisco, while sales and marketing were completely reorganized. As one of the 900-pound gorillas for call control, dominating 350 service providers, including all of the world's largest telecom firms, BroadWorks is a key part of many of the phone calls made on the planet. Service Providers from Orange in France, to the US Postal Service via AT&T, to Lumen's SIP Trunking, to Telstra in Australia, to the US Department of Justice are operating BroadWorks platforms for core calling.
This brief summary will look at some of the new enhancements from Cisco that are being deployed by BroadWorks operators, organized by key feature categories.
Better Integration with AI and other Call Recording Platforms
BroadWorks now has improved support for the BroadWorks Call Recording Interface for mobile operators (using IMS XS mode). This makes it much easier to build products that use the audio stream of the call for AI-based sentiment analysis, transcription, and yes, conventional call recording.
Mobile Integration
Desk phones are becoming specialized devices akin to fax machines, while mobile (cellular) usage is dominating consumer and business use worldwide. The Verizon OneTalk product, built on BroadWorks, is one example of fixed-mobile convergence, where users can have a cell phone that shares a line with a business line.
Call Center features on Mobile. Systems built on the BroadWorks Call Center features (a kind of call queueing and agent distribution) now get better support for managing their availability on call centers. This allows users to join and unjoin without using an app or web interface.
Missed Call Notifications via SMS. BroadWorks already had the ability to send Message Waiting Indicator information to mobile users; but now BroadWorks can also deliver missed call alerts via SMS even if no voicemail is left. Previously these alerts were only sent through conventional email.
Location information (ATI Query in Ro CCR Initial Message) now enjoys better support. This should improve performance in emergency call routing - by getting better information about a user's location to route calls to the correct PSAP. And it could be used to improve the performance of Fraud detection and prevention.
Improved Management of Mobile Subscriber Directory Numbers. BroadWorks already had the ability to manage MSDNs and Dialable Numbers (DNs) at the "group" level. (In BroadWorks, the system has Enterprises, Enterprises have Groups, and Groups have Users aka Subscribers.) Now both MSDNs and DNs can be managed at the enterprise level.
Other cool features expand the ability of mobile network operators (MNOs), such as Femtocell Integration for 5G, where very-small-cells operate inside macro cells. Another useful capability will help external Voicemail platforms (such as Mavenir/Comverse,Ericsson, Metaswitch, Alcatel-Lucent-Nokia) get information about the reachability of the mobile users.
Better Metering and Charging Support
Several features will let service providers deploy flexible features using the interfaces for charging. For example, Auto Attendant, Call, Center and Hunt groups can now be metered using a prepaid calling interface, allowing an external system to control access to these features through a separate API. (I personally see the lateral uses of this API as being more useful than the direct use; i.e., it hardly seems useful to prepay for 50 "hunt group activation" instances, but having an external system to get a trigger and grant permission for a hunt group activation could allow for innovative new integrations. E.g., When the hunt group is activated, trigger a database lookup necessary to do fraud detection for the financial services industry.)
ECG offers software developers with extensive experience using the BroadWorks APIs. We can help you use these new APIs to create innovative new services. Read more.
Provisioning Portal API Enhancement
Every large operator uses Alpaca to create and manage users in their BroadWorks environment (or, in some cases, a third-party or private portal tool). BroadWorks now provides better information about the causes of failures inside the provisioning workflows directly back in the API, allowing the users -- or the software -- to get better insight on what's happening inside Broadworks should a particular action be impossible at the moment.
Learn more about Alpaca, ECG's portal for management of large-scale BroadWorks networks. Read More.
Continued Strength from a Market Leader
BroadWorks remains a cornerstone platform in the global telecom ecosystem—reliable, deeply integrated, and trusted by hundreds of the world’s largest service providers. While ECG also supports platforms like Ribbon, NetSapiens, Alianza/Metaswitch, FreeSWITCH/Kamailio, and others, BroadWorks stands out for its maturity and the lessons it offers in product strategy and ecosystem development.
What’s increasingly clear is that BroadWorks operators are innovating not by waiting for bundled feature updates, but by harnessing external APIs to integrate best-of-breed components—AI-powered transcription and sentiment analysis, advanced billing engines, mobile and visual voicemail platforms, and more. This decentralized approach to innovation favors service providers that invest in internal software development capabilities.
Cisco’s recent updates signal a deliberate move toward openness, interoperability, and modular service delivery. Rather than relying on a pre-integrated stack, providers are expected to assemble solutions that meet the evolving expectations of a mobile-first, API-enabled, and intelligent communications world.
For UCaaS and SIP trunking providers, the opportunity isn’t merely in deploying what’s new—it’s in building what’s next. With BroadWorks as a flexible foundation, those who embrace integration and agility will be best positioned to lead in the next era of cloud communications.
