VOSS Solutions has unveiled its latest Shared Architecture innovations providing its most comprehensive end-to-end solution to date, for Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) partners.
Shared Architecture from Cisco enables HCS partners to offer UC-as-a-Service (/unified-communications/ucaas) to customers, which includes a rich array of collaboration tools at a more affordable price. HCS Shared Architecture shares a UC cluster with multiple tenants, and allows customers to automate the end user onboarding process, both of which lead to impressive operational savings. Shared Architecture is designed to serve customers with less than 100 users, however nothing prevents Shared Architecture from serving larger customers as well.
Built on multi-tenant Cisco HCS, CUCM and CUC environments, the VOSS Shared Architecture solution is the quickest and most cost-effective way to onboard, provision and manage new customers. Additionally, it brings new options to add value to – and differentiate – an HCS partner’s market offering. As a result, VOSS empowers HCS partners to offer cost-effective and easy-to-consume cloud communications solutions to customers of all sizes.
Announced in February 2017, the VOSS Shared Architecture solution has been well-received by the Cisco HCS partner base. A number of global HCS partners have installed the VOSS Shared Architecture solution to target the SME market, as a natural extension to their existing VOSS-managed HCS architecture serving larger enterprises.
The latest Shared Architecture solution from VOSS has an optional pre-built integration with Jamcracker to allow providers to host a branded portal for SMEs to order their UC cloud services. Behind the scenes, enhanced VOSS-4-UC workflows automate the initial customer onboarding, user provisioning, and Imagicle directory service set up.
Workflow enhancements include:
- Single workflow that defines and adds multiple customer sites simultaneously in a single workflow
- Flow through, “zero touch” provisioning for end users
- Data push and pull with an LDAP directory
- Automatic number allocation
- External numbers based on area code selection
- Internal extensions based on next available
- Full infrastructure setup required for the Imagicle Directory Service
- UCM Jabber configuration file and TFTP service restart
- Expressway setup
- Per device setup to use the service
- Imagicle user sync initiation
- VOSS-4-UC phone-based registration or CUCM self-provisioning will be enabled to ease handset deployment
The VOSS solution also fully utilises VOSS’ advanced HCS dial plan management functionality, which has been designed for multi-tenancy from the outset. It also builds on extensive field experience with both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ Active Directory and LDAP integration. Enhancements have also been made to offer service provider portal integration into VOSS-4-UC, and integration with billing systems.
Bill Dellara, VP Product at VOSS Solutions commented:
“Cisco and VOSS have invested more than 10 years of development work into providing large and complex HCS customers with the very best cloud communications experience. It’s fantastic that this deep understanding of cloud communications is now being repurposed so that smaller customers can quickly and efficiently access sophisticated Cisco HCS-based service offerings, without the need to dumb-down access to the underlying Cisco UC feature set.”
Henry Barton, VP Strategy at VOSS, added:
“We have real-life examples that the VOSS Shared Architecture solution is enabling HCS partners to achieve low operational costs while providing the flexibility to differentiate their market offering, to ensure they go to market with a compelling and competitive solution for SMEs.”
