NEW ORLEANS--BroadSoft made its first official foray into the wireless market this week at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association’s Wireless 2005 show, lending its voice-over-IP expertise to its effort to expand into mobile carrier networks.

The company’s mobile entry strategy is twofold: It announced commercial availability of an application server that is compliant with the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture, and it launched a mobile PBX application aimed at the wireless carrier segment. Ericsson and Lucent Technologies are both using the IMS-compliant application server in separate rollouts with carriers that BroadSoft currently can not name.

“We provide all the signaling and call control functions that we do today on the wired side,” said Scott Wharton, vice president of marketing for BroadSoft, of the IMS platform’s capabilities. “Over the last six to nine months the carriers have all been embracing IMS, but the question has been, ‘What apps?’”

Wharton said BroadSoft’s Mobile PBX application is the first and best answer to that question because it lets any service provider that wants to offer wireless do so quickly--and to an end customer segment that is highly coveted.

“No one has really penetrated the enterprise market with an offer that’s very compelling,” he said. “This really gives some stickiness and some added value.”

The existence of not only an IMS-compliant VoIP platform but also an application that leverages it also fits well with the increasingly popular mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) approach to delivering wireless, Wharton said. This approach can give MVNO brand companies more control over the services that they essentially are reselling from other service providers, and therefore tighter ownership of and loyalty from their end customers. “There will be an MVNO explosion based on this,” he said.