Cisco employees are moving towards a mobile collaborative office environment – within the workplace. We sit where we like and log into the nearest phone, using extension mobility. But when we traveled to different Cisco offices around the world, we couldn’t log in to the Cisco IP phone:  extension mobility only worked at certain limited locations within our home region.

Now, employee phones can essentially follow them to any Cisco office worldwide because Cisco IT deployed the Extension Mobility Cross Cluster (EMCC) feature on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM).

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Tags: coc-borderless-networks, em, emcc, extension mobility, globalization, IP telephony, IPT, mobility, UC, UCM, unified communications

To serve our headquarters campus in San Jose, California, Cisco IT deployed one of the world’s largest Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM) clusters, with 9 pairs of subscribers and a publisher supporting this one campus. Together with these main 19-servers the campus cluster also includes Unity node servers, presence servers and management servers, for a total of 48 Cisco MCS 7845s. In June 2012, we migrated these legacy servers to virtualized machines running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers over a single weekend. Read More »

Tags: IP telephony, IP Telephony on UCS, IPT, migration, UC on UCS, unified communications, virtual machines

Securing Cisco IP phone communications is important that helps organizations protect trade secrets and facilitate business and compliance requirements. Cisco IP phones support secure communication for both control and data channels. The security that is incorporated into Cisco IP phones includes the encryption and authentication of signaling communications between the Cisco IP phones and the Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Moreover, Cisco Unified Communications Manager supports encryption, authentication, and anti-replay protection of the voice packets that are exchanged between Cisco IP phones.

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Tags: IP Phones, IPT, security, Voice, voip, voip security

How many people does it take to manage the service infrastructure supporting over 150,000 hardware phones, 50,000 soft phones, and 10,000 room and desktop video devices. That’s the size of our UC infrastructure at Cisco, and today we manage all our voice, voicemail, and video services with an integrated voice and video Tier 3 operations team of 25 people, and another 5 people supporting contact center applications and services. We do this by continually finding new efficiencies – learning new ways to support existing services so we can spend more time learning how to support the new technologies.

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Tags: coc-collaboration, endpoint, infrastructure, IPT, operations, organization, support, telephony, TelePresence, UC, unified communications, unity, video, Voice, voicemail, voip

Cisco IT has deployed voice infrastructure around the world in order to handle our 1+ million voice calls per day with high levels of quality and reliability. We used to manage this infrastructure with four separate regional teams: one managing the Western part of North America, another managing Eastern North America and Latin America, the third Europe/Middle East/Africa, and the fourth Asia/Pacific. But we found that this regional organization led to inconsistent operations because the regional teams had different ideas on how things should be done and they applied our corporate standards in different ways.

Our early lack of global consistency led to inefficiency in our support operations.   We would have people from different time zones trying to help troubleshoot problems and be unable to support an unfamiliar configuration.  And this meant that our regional teams had to provide around-the-clock support by themselves – which led to sleepless nights and frayed nerves.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, IPT, management, operations, support, telephony, UC, unified communications, unity, video, Voice, voicemail, voip