**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from November and December.**

Cisco on Friday closed its acquisition of BroadSoft, the cloud UC and services provider. The purchase made a big splash when it was announced back in October.

The deal, worth $1.9 billion, puts Cisco on the fast track to having a full, multitenant SaaS collaboration solution, partnerships with more than 450 telecom carriers in 80 countries, and about 19 million BroadSoft business subscribers.

By combining BroadSoft’s open interface and standards-based solutions primarily delivered via service provider partners, with Cisco’s existing portfolio, the combined company will offer what is says are “best-of-breed solutions” for businesses of all sizes — delivered through VAR and service-provider partners. Together, Cisco and BroadSoft will deliver a full suite of rich collaboration experiences to power the future of work, the vendor wrote.

When Cisco made the BroadSoft announcement last year, Rob Salvagno, vice president corporate business development at Cisco, noted that BroadSoft’s portfolio complemented Cisco’s existing on-premises and enterprise-centric Hosted Collaboration Solutions (HCS), as well as Cisco’s overall “cloud investment strategy” — those being the operative words.

At that time, we talked to Art Schoeller, vice president and principle analyst at Forrester Research, who admitted being caught off guard by the Cisco news, believing that it was as if the train had already left the station for Cisco. Nevertheless, he said, “While it might mean change for Cisco in terms of its strategy, at the end of the day, the bottom line for Cisco is that this accelerates its pathway to a full SaaS solution and puts them out there with an incredibly sized base and channel, which is very important to Cisco,” Schoeller told us.

Former BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler and his organization are joining Cisco’s Unified Communications Technology Group led by vice president and general manager Tom Puorro, under the Applications Group led by Rowan Trollope.