Bright House Expands Business Wares

Bright House Networks’ Enterprise Solutions unit is expanding its offerings with the addition of  a unified communications service that’s designed to keep workers connected in the office and on the go.

The new offering, which works with the MSO’s Hosted Voice solution, adds enhances such as video calling, instant messaging, desktop sharing, and web collaboration. Bright House said it has also developed a mobile app for it that runs on select Apple and Android-powered devices.

"Unified communications are a necessity to keep up in today's fast-paced and increasingly mobile work environment where workers can't afford to be tethered to their desk, or their PC," said Craig Cowden, chief network officer and senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions for Bright House, in a statement. "With our fully-owned private fiber-optic network and our cloud-based hosted voice platform, Bright House Networks is uniquely positioned to offer our clients the flexible communications solutions that provide seamless collaboration with everywhere connectivity."

Bright House is rolling out the new product as business services continues to represent a key growth driver for the cable industry. According to the latest forecast from Heavy Reading, U.S. MSOs pulled in about $8.5 billion in commercial service revenues last year, and are on pace to reach $10 billion in 2014.

Bright House serves about 2.5 million customers in parts of five states: Florida, Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and California.