Last night I spent time with a very interesting group of business owners who have come together to create the Cloud Communications Alliance. They embody the spirit of the telecom entrepreneur by creating regional businesses that support SMBs with great products, support and competitive pricing. By forming the alliance they have created “the first nationwide high-definition enterprise voice network in the cloud - with no PBX to buy and no long distance costs between cloud customers.”

My original interest in the group was to see if our Carrier Sales group might have an opportunity to provide Broadvox SIP Termination and Origination to either the individual companies or the group. While that remains a potential, the more interesting question that arose was whether we should join the group to leverage their experience and business savvy regarding BroadSoft? Both The Cloud Communications Alliance and Cypress Communications (soon to merge with Broadvox) use the BroadSoft BroadWorks platform. Therefore, there may be some synergy in becoming a member as well as a service provider.

With that in mind, I took a closer look at BroadSoft as a company today. Their stock is at its highest point since the IPO launched this year and they have “Buy” recommendations from many financial analysts. I, also, found it very timely and important the recent announcement of BroadCloud, a hosted infrastructure to serve as the foundation for BroadSoft’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) communications capabilities. These seem to be very good days for BroadSoft.

As for Research In Motion, these may be the beginning of bad days. Of note this week was the news that Bank of America and Citigroup may follow Dell’s lead and switch to the Apple iPhone as their approved corporate mobile device. RIM has struggled to keep the BlackBerry as cool as the new smartphones and Apple has addressed its enterprise shortcomings. I found this news less comforting as I received by new BlackBerry Torch yesterday (Broadvox is still a RIM company). As I gain some experience with it, I’ll let you know how it compares to the iPhone as a business tool.

See you on Friday…