– VOSS Solutions has successfully upgraded En Pointe Technologies, a solution provider of IT products and services and Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) customer, onto version 8.6.2 of the Cisco HCS platform; En Pointe is the first North American company to be upgraded onto the new version.
En Pointe, a US-based national solutions provider, serves the marketplace with information technology hardware, software licensing support, and IT services. In February 2012, En Pointe announced the launch of a next generation hosted collaboration solution, based on Cisco HCS, called ECS (En Pointe Collaboration Solution).This hosted subscription-based service integrates voice, mobility, audio, web and video conferencing, presence technology, and call center as part of the next generation in communications solutions.
In September 2012, En Pointe recognized two market advantages of being the first provider to upgrade to HCS 8.6.2:
1. The latest Cisco HCS platform gives En Pointe access to a wealth of advanced collaboration features, including:
a. Feature parity with the current version of Unified Communications Manager
b. Contact center support of up to 1,000 agents
c. IMS-based mobility service integration
2. Being the first provider onto the 8.6.2 platform gives En Pointe a competitive edge over other HCS providers, as En Pointe offers the latest HCS functionality that no other provider can currently match.
En Pointe selected the VOSS Global Services team to carry out the upgrade, due to VOSS having a proven track record with, and demonstrating a deep knowledge of, the Cisco HCS platform. The upgrade took just two weeks. In that time, VOSS carried out a detailed survey of the En Pointe environment to fully understand the scope of the upgrade project. VOSS then replicated En Pointe’s environment exactly, in a VOSS lab. VOSS fully tested the platform upgrade under lab conditions, before carrying out the live project, over a single weekend. As a result of the smart practises displayed by VOSS during the project, En Pointe did not suffer any impact to service during upgrade.
“We’re excited to be the first HCS customer on the new Cisco platform as it gives us a competitive edge over other HCS providers. VOSS is part of the system that does provisioning on the backend for us so essentially they are the backbone for our company. Their in-depth knowledge of the HCS platform itself provides us with many advantages, especially faster issue resolution,” said Mustafa Baig, Collaboration Solution Manager at En Pointe. “Now, with more advanced collaboration features available to us, we can continue to provide business with a unified communications platform that ensures a secure, reliable, scalable, and highly available communicant infrastructure across the entire organization.”