PRESS RELEASE: VOSS Solutions issued guidance to Cisco HCS partners following Cisco’s announcement that Cisco UCDM (Unified Communications Domain Manager) will reach end of sale in February 2019.

In Cisco’s announcement dated August 14 2018, the CUCDM product lifecycle will end in February 2019. CUCDM has already been removed from all Cisco HCS perpetual bundles, but is still available as an independent SKU. However, the list price for the independent CUCDM SKU is now approximately four times the price of the previous HCS bundle.

Mike Frayne, CEO at VOSS Solutions, commented; “Our message to CUCDM users is to not panic. The end of life of CUCDM does not mean that HCS partners have to follow an immediate rip-and-replace ‘revolution’ of their UC management component. VOSS empowers HCS partners to take control; to choose the best transition path for their business and to dictate their own transition timeframe”.

A key factor of the VOSS transition offering is that, with the wealth of experience that VOSS has gathered over 12 years of providing the CUCDM technology to Cisco and working with the HCS partner community, VOSS is able to take over the support of CUCDM licenses immediately, to provide a continued service to HCS partners while they decide on the future of their UC management component. Importantly, VOSS is the only provisioning partner in the Cisco ecosystem that is offering unconditional free trade-in for all existing CUCDM licenses. Furthermore, VOSS is the only vendor that will allow HCS partners to immediately acquire VOSS-4-UC licenses that deliver the same functionality that CUCDM provides, to help HCS partners avoid absorbing the significant price increase associated with CUCDM.

One concern for Cisco HCS partners will be the risk involved in transitioning their HCS platform to a new UC management tool, and the migration of their customers from one platform to another. With so many users, devices and services to consider, and with so much data in the live environment, this will be no mean feat.

VOSS has been operating a H.O.M.E program for the last 18 months, carefully guiding major HCS partners away from CUCDM and onto the VOSS-4-UC management platform. When HCS partners take the decision to move to VOSS-4-UC, they will receive all the existing functionality that is currently in CUCDM plus so much more, while minimizing the impact on service continuity. VOSS-4-UC includes many additional features, such as coordinated management for Webex Teams Hybrid, customized UC management to better align with operational processes and integrate with back office systems, and also UC management of both Cisco, Broadsoft, and Microsoft UC. With VOSS, HCS partners will benefit from new modules, such as VOSS Assurance & Analytics for monitoring, troubleshooting, data mining, and access to contextual insight and improved reporting.

Henry Barton, VP Operations Strategy at VOSS, added; “After purchasing licenses from VOSS, HCS partners follow a structured and highly automated transition program; migrating phones, devices and users over to the new UC management platform seamlessly and with minimum impact to end customers. We have done this many times already, so HCS partners can expect a a robust and proven process that delivers the value of the of the new platform while minimizing the impact on the partner and their customers”.

A key driver for HCS partners to choose VOSS-4-UC is their growing interest in differentiating their offering to the UCaaS market. All end customers that choose to consume their UC as a service expect the cost and time-saving benefits of a standard cloud-based solution, but also require a certain level of customization to suit their business processes and workflows.

With more than 100 adaptations delivered to HCS partners to date, VOSS enables an organization to tailor the sophisticated VOSS-4-UC operations management platform to suit the specific needs of the business, without complex, labor-intensive coding or the associated time and budget implications. These adaptations mean that Cisco HCS partners can easily differentiate their UCaaS offering, to create custom UC environments that suit particular business cases, depending on their customers’ size, industry, and geography.

To date, 33% of the organizations that have production HCS platforms have made the decision to transition from CUCDM to VOSS-4-UC. As a result, more than 1.2 million production end user devices (EUDs) have already moved from CUCDM to be managed in production by VOSS-4-UC. In total, there are active transition plans to move 50% of all the production HCS EUDs to a VOSS-4-UC managed platform.

Mike Frayne concluded; “HCS partners have existing customers on their platforms and they need to provide them with continuity under the contracts they have in place with these customers. As a result, HCS partners need a strategy to deal with CUCDM no longer being available over time, and a transition plan that not only mitigates the risks and minimizes the impact on their customers and operational capabilities, but also maintains their margins by avoiding having to buy new licenses to replace CUCDM or pay more for CUCDM functionality. VOSS is uniquely positioned to help manage this business continuity and at the same time provide enhanced capabilities to both improve but simultaneously maintain their end customers’ experience. VOSS-4-UC is the leading UC management vendor and is able to deliver the additional features and capabilities the market needs, while managing the transitional risks so that HCS partners can evolve to the new HCS reference architecture in a controlled, seamless manner.”

Organizations wishing to learn more about the VOSS H.O.M.E program are encouraged to contact VOSS directly: [email protected].