Company becomes the first service provider to integrate BroadSoft's hosted business voice with Microsoft's communications and collaboration software.

LightEdge Solutions Inc., a hosted services partner dedicated to the communications and IT needs for small and medium-sized businesses, Microsoft Corp. and BroadSoft Inc. today announced the general availability of Hosted Unified Communications, a new service based on BroadSoft's BroadWorks Voice-over-IP (VoIP) application platform and Microsoft Solution for hosted messaging and collaboration.

The company claims that the solution provides one platform for voice, e-mail, instant messaging and calendaring, allowing a user to work anywhere and collaborate in real time. It states that Hosted Unified Communications is part of its connected office suite of products, and helps SMBs more easily and cost-effectively obtain unified communications (UC) as a hosted service. The company further says that its connected office suite includes Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for hosted e-mail, BroadSoft BroadWorks Hosted PBX VoIP, Office Communications Server 2007 for instant messaging and presence, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. It adds that the solution can be purchased incrementally or as an entire integrated bundle to support a business e-mail, calendaring, conferencing, voice and collaboration needs.

''Our goal is to offer SMBs a better and more cost-effective way to provide communications and IT systems to their employees,'' said Jeff Springborn, President and COO of LightEdge. ''Hosted Unified Communications helps us reinforce this aim, by providing an attractive alternative to purchasing, implementing and maintaining business communications systems in-house.''

''In today's economy, it's important to offer SMBs the flexibility to choose whether to deploy a UC solution in a hosted environment or on-premises, depending on their individual needs," said John Zanni, general manager of Worldwide Software + Services Industry for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. ''Hosted Unified Communications utilizes the BroadSoft platform and Microsoft software to deliver a protected, fully hosted unified messaging and communications solution that allows SMBs to focus on their core business, without spending their time, money and resources managing a complex VoIP infrastructure.''

''Forward-thinking providers like LightEdge understand the powerful capabilities that result from combining best-of-breed solutions — business communications from BroadSoft and Microsoft's business productivity software - and are able to deliver UC in an innovative way,'' said David Bukovsky, Vice President of products at BroadSoft. ''There's a growing demand among SMBs for UC to be delivered in a software as a service model as it enables them to reap all the productivity benefits of UC without the burden of deploying and maintaining UC solutions on their own. The LightEdge deployment validates the delivery model for integrated BroadSoft-Microsoft applications and represents a milestone for bringing hosted UC to the underserved SMB market.''