BroadSoft announces its intent to acquire privately held, Cupertino, California-based Packet Island, a pioneer of SaaS-based quality of service assessment and monitoring tools for VoIP and video networks and services.

The acquisition enables BroadSoft to address the critical need in the market of ensuring QoS, and quality of experience, for real-time communications. BroadSoft's expanded solutions portfolio will now enable service providers to offer significantly enhanced QoS assessment and monitoring capabilities of their communication services. These solutions enable service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy VoIP and video services with guaranteed end-to-end "carrier-grade" service delivery.

Packet Island's lifecycle management solutions enable customers to:

• Assess networks before deploying VoIP and video services
• Verify the deployments to establish a baseline
• Continuously monitor and re-assess the service quality on a periodic basis
• Provide troubleshooting tools to pinpoint problems in both the LAN and WAN

This approach, coupled with Packet Island's use of Deep Packet Inspection technology, allows service providers to dramatically reduce support costs and end-customer churn.

Once the acquisition is complete, all Packet Island employees will be retained and Packet Island founder and CEO Praveen Kumar will become BroadSoft's PacketSmart Chief Technologist.