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

Changing voicemail systems--or the servers they run on--can be a big, time-consuming, and difficult task. Yet recently we did both.  We migrated our application platform from Cisco Unity 7.0 (2) running on Cisco 7800 Series Media Convergence Servers,  to Cisco Unity Connection 8.5 running as a virtual machine onthe Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. What’s more, we completed the cutover of more than 87,000 voicemail boxes to the new platform in a single weekend.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, migration, UC, UC on UCS, UCS, unified communications, unity, unity connection, virtual server, voicemail