Last week, I described what Cisco Unified Mobility is and what it does for me and the other thousands of employees at Cisco. Today, let me tell you about the deployment process and what we learned.
Cisco IT Implementation
Cisco Unified Mobility requires our Cisco Unified Communications Managers to be on version 7.1 or above, and we started deploying the service soon after we’d upgraded to 7.1. We deployed Cisco Unified Mobility in each of our 13 Cisco Unified Communications Manager clusters, rolling out the service on a site-by-site basis. This gradual transition process helped to smooth the impact of supporting users and the potential for spikes in outbound calls as employees began working with the SNR feature. At first, we worried that a large number of calls going out to mobile phones from Cisco sites might overwhelm smaller outbound trunks, but so far we haven’t seen any problems there. Also, our gradual site-based rollout made it easy to avoid countries that do not allow outbound calling from our private VoIP network to the PSTN (primarily in the Middle East, and in India).
Steven Boutelle, Vice President, Cisco Global Government Solutions Group would like to share some of the latest updates to the Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) program and provide an expert’s overview on where the satellite industry stands today. Watch Steven’s interview below!
To further assist in moving IRIS forward, TeleCommunications Systems, Inc. has been selected as an exclusive service provider. This is another milestone in the long-term collaboration between TCS and Cisco in an effort to move IRIS onward.
A lot of our employees, especially salespeople, seem to work everywhere except at their desks. Reaching them used to mean making multiple calls to multiple numbers, and leaving messages at each one. And waiting for an important phone call sometimes meant that you were tied to your desk until it came through.
Now, with Single Number Reach (SNR) — a feature of Cisco Unified Mobility — I can receive business calls wherever I want to be reached at the moment--at my desk, at home, or on my mobile phone. And if I can’t answer, Cisco Unified Mobility gets all my messages sent to a single voicemail box. There’s also a Mobility feature that lets me transfer calls from my office phone to my mobile phone, and back again – without anyone on the other end knowing I’ve changed phones. This helps when I pick up an important call at my desk, but need to take care of something that takes me away from the desk phone. Sometimes I’ve got to get in the car and can use my Bluetooth headset to finish the conversation.
My current SNR profile is configured to route calls to my mobile inside of normal working hours, and then to push them to voicemail on weekends. I even have an access control list (ACL) to allow my manager’s calls to pass through to the mobile number at any day/hour. He does respect normal work hours but we do know emergencies happen from time to time and it is important to be accessible.
All of these Cisco Unified Mobility features were made available to 80,000 phones in our company, by activating them on in our eighteen production Unified Communications server clusters around the world. The truly impressive thing about the Cisco Unified Mobility service is that it can scale to companies of any size. The benefits to the individual user apply no matter if you are an 8 or 80,000 person company. Mobility benefits the individual most.
From our deployment activity, we learned valuable lessons for our customers about implementation decisions, feature adoption by users, and the resulting business benefits.
Earlier this week, Eric Schoch, Senior Director for Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution business and Roberta Mackintosh, Verizon’s Director of Unified Communications and Collaboration hosted a ‘Collaboration to the Cloud’ discussion over TelePresence and WebEx with journalists and analysts in Boston, Florida, New York, Washington and Toronto.
Eric and Roberta expanded on each company’s vision for collaboration in the cloud and gave details on their partnership to offer Unified Communications and Collaboration services. Verizon has integrated Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and now offers an enterprise unified communications and collaboration platform which can be tailored and customized for its customers. The platform can be deployed as cloud-based only or as a hybrid of a cloud service and on-premise offering. In phase one of the deployment, some of the applications included are voice, video, instant messaging, and presence based such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Mobility, Cisco Unified Presence, Cisco Unity Connection, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center (hosted by Cisco).
View the video to hear more about:
o Why I should care about cloud collaboration as a service provider?
o Why are service providers essential for collaboration in the cloud?
o How is Verizon currently deploying collaboration solutions via the cloud?
o What are the collaboration deployment issues that are facing enterprises?
These 3 steps will ensure you get the right solution to meet your needs now—and in the future.
A unified communications (UC) solution means different things to different people. In a broad sense, it integrates your voice and data networks. It can show up as a simple integration of your email with your voicemail into a single messaging inbox. It can be far more complex with presence and instant messaging technologies, fax, SMS, video and web conferencing applications all tying employees together. Or, you can have a UC solution somewhere in between—one that is tailored specifically to the needs of your small business.
No matter which components you choose, all unified communications solutions offer the same benefits to your employees: they can reach one another on the first try, they can be more productive, and they can collaborate more effectively. As a result, UC can reduce network and communications costs.
