BroadSoft (News - Alert), a provider of 'Voice over Internet Protocol' or 'VoIP' applications that caters to the needs of the telecommunications industry, has announced that its Marketplace is being leveraged by SimpleSignal and Telesphere (News - Alert), two companies that provide 'Communications-as-a-Service' or 'CaaS' solutions and services, for pilot testing of IP-powered communication application stores.

These stores will help end-users in directly purchasing third-party communications applications and services online. Both SimpleSignal and Telesphere online stores are fixed-line VoIP service providers, and further strengthen BroadSoft's Xtended program, which offers a variety of compelling and innovative third-party applications to service providers and their subscribers.

The BroadSoft Marketplace functions on the basis of a revenue sharing model, and helps BroadSoft-powered service providers in leveraging the potential of the developer community of BroadSoft, which has over 3,000 members. The marketplace also enables BroadSoft Xtended developers to get financial benefits from their talent and creativity.

As more and more subscribers need richer and more specialized communication interactions, the marketplace offers an opportunity to service providers and developers to capitalize on these demands. The pilot store features a number of applications for the service providers and subscribers, such as PhoneTag, which is a service that automatically transcribes voice messages into text and delivers them by SMS or email, so that users can read their voice messages in near real-time. QuickSet Pro is a yet another application offered through the pilot store, which runs on the Adobe Air platform and allows access to several IP phone services from a Windows PC or Mac.

Apart from them, a number of applications useful in various fields such as customer relationship management or 'CRM', business productivity, personal communications and mobile interactions over iPhone (News - Alert) and BlackBerry devices are being developed to be offered through the pilot stores.

In the words of Sanjay Srinivasan, CTO for Telesphere, this is a groundbreaking step in hosted business telecommunications, and the company is honored and excited to be part of it. Srinivasan noted that for the first time ever, customers of Telesphere will have the ability to quickly customize their service as easily as purchasing a book or a song online.

According to Dave Gilbert, CEO of SimpleSignal, this store for cloud communications apps will do for the company what Apple (News - Alert)'s application store did for the iPhone and mobile phone functionality. Gilbert continued that from the application store, users can easily choose from a variety of newly-developed voice applications, and this ability for users to customize their features and functions is all made possible by business communications technologies evolving out of the closet and into the cloud.

In April 2010, Alteva, a Philadelphia-based a unified communication solution provider entered a partnership with Microsoft (News - Alert) and BroadSoft to provide a true hosted unified communications solution to small business firms.