It seems like the explosion in companies selling hosted services has had an amazing impact on Broadsoft the leader in supplying service providers with hosted platforms. I have heard good things from Broadsoft’s customers and I have seen the company do better and better as of late.

The company put out a release today touting its accomplishments as of late. They are now delivering services for 6 of the top 10 and 11 of the top 25 global carriers (based on revenue). They are also delivering the first IMS-compliant application software to market through partners such as Ericsson, Lucent and Italtel.

The company furthered doubled revenues for the year. This marks the eight consecutive quarter of sequential quarterly revenue growth. Not only has the company been ringing up new sales it has been busy adding services such as custom ringback and a video softphone.

Furthermore, the company has built a converged services platform used to offer advanced calling services between 3G mobile phones and IP video phones.

I keep hearing more and more positive news from the service providers offering hosted services. Although my informal polling in the past has shown that enterprise customers are lukewarm to the concept of hosting, service providers tell me the customers they have are hooked and love the service.

They argue that hosting is just so much more flexible and cost effective than a premise based systems that every SMB will have to consider and deploy hosted solutions. They go on to say that large organizations are hosting their remote workers and branch offices as well.

Another benefit of hosting is that it decouples telephony from the last-mile solution allowing companies more flexibility in changing last-mile providers. This also means companies are more easily able to negotiate favorable rates for access.

The service providers further say that with more education, the market will do even better. I am aware of some big plans from these hosted providers to do an incredible amount of promotion and education in 2006. If this is the case then the outlook for hosted VoIP could be much larger than expected.

In addition as more remote workers are created – and this trend seems to be speeding up not slowing down, we can expect the desire for hosted service to grow as well.

If the growth turns out to be as large as the optimists hope then we can expect Broadsoft to continue its rapid growth for some time to come.