Item: Cisco Hosted Unified Communications Services
Rating: 9
Author: Rui Ferraz

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Hosted Unified Communications Services

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are exploring Cisco Hosted Unified Communication Services (HCS) as a product for SMB and corporate clients (starting from 200 extensions), linking Cisco solutions capabilities (offering SIP trunk connections to the SBCs of IP Centrex platforms) with IP Centrex platforms. Cisco HCS solves the issue of having a centralized SIP platform where one can register Cisco phones, and not just the SMB series. The platform is very scalable and can offer a license number variation. The platform can allow for the implementation of Cisco portfolio using a solution with a reduced OPEX/CAPEX.

Pros and Cons

Pros

VoIP best practices
UC and IM
Centralized management and provisioning
Reduced OPEX/CAPEX in the implementation
Security and integration with other UC platforms using SIP (Except Lync)

Cons

Integration with contact center plaforms
Integration with other UC platforms
Lower the tennant size and clusters capacity
Cisco's pressure to buy more and more licences, even not having a stale client pipeline (From the ISP point of view)

Return on Investment

Reduces the need to have a higher CAPEX in order to buy all the licenses at the start of the project.
The licensing is perpetual, the only associated cost with the licenses are SWSS.
Desktop sharing isn't a functionality.
Cisco SMB series can be used only with the higher cost licensing (Foundation/Standard).

Alternatives Considered

Collab OneContact, Skype for Business, Cisco CallManager and Cisco Contact Center

Cisco HCS platform is to be seen as a centralized UC platforms, that can be scalable as an IP Centrex solution and as rich in functionalities as a Cisco CUCM.
If you're looking for a solution and your main focus is IM & P functionalities rather than voice, Lync is a good solution. If your focus is voice and telephony, Cisco is a better solution.

Other Software Used

Skype for Business, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for:
Clients with call managers that want to continue using Cisco and want to minimize the new CAPEX.
Clients that want to outsource the platform management and support.
Clients that have a variation on the number of extensions.

Although, Cisco HCS, is a solution that has a higher opex than the ones supported in ISP IP Centrex.

Comments

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HCS - Cisco's rich environment (but centralized)