Category: Cisco UC&C

I believe the highlight of the week now is the acquisition deal that Cisco announced to acquire the Cloud Communications company Broadsoft. Here is the news: https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1887125

Check the new Agile Blueprint from Cisco Learning Network

CCIE/CCDE Continuous Evolution: The Agile Blueprints

Recently, I came across a very insightful article discussing the importance of securing business and personal VoIP communications platform specially Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The article was published on “nojitter” and by Andrew Prokop

http://www.nojitter.com/post/240172189

Recently, I came across an interesting article on SDXCentral portal addressing Applications Performance from the Network perspective (every application at some point can potentially underperform) and Network mitigation to address these underperformance issues. It starts by laying out the three major network aspects that can be found in any Private or Public Cloud implementations of applications namely: Network Delay, Packet Loss, and Jitter.

Three interesting performance mitigation methods the author is proposing:

• Intelligent  Connectivity Model with Hybrid WAN and with SD-WAN logic in place
• Multidimensional Quality of Service Techniques that can be deployed close-to-the-device, close-to-the-edge,  and Core QoS WAN and LAN implementation
• Application Awareness of Network conditions and adaptation. This is an interesting topic I will cover in details soon an separate article

I hope you like the article. You can read it HERE

An interesting ready from No Jitter blog on the new Cisco Spark Flex Plan and new BE offering. Some details can be seen here

http://www.nojitter.com/post/240172104/cisco-simplifies-spark-decision-buying-process

In the recent Cisco Partner Summit, Cisco made several announcements in Collaboration technologies by introducing, what it seems to be, a simple and flexible offering with SPARK and Collaborations Business Edition. These new innovative offering complement Cisco’s clear strategy for Digital network architecture (DNA) and Cloud-managed solutions. The announcement includes:

• Cisco Spark Flex Plan:

Cisco is introducing a Flex-Plan Licensing Model in which allow customers that are having strong cloud-based strategy to gradually migrate their Collaborations workload by providing a customer choice to have a little mix between Spark Cloud and On premises services with a flexibility to decide which load can be on premises and which can be managed in the cloud with Spark, all with a single Contract. Meetings can be hosted in the Cloud with Spark Meetings/Webex or on-premises using Cisco Meeting Server. Calls can be handled using Cisco UCM on-premises and Voice gateways or using Cisco Spark Calls. “Migration” of any service can be done at any time within this Plan.

• Cisco Spark Depot:

It is a newly introduced Depot for developing Partners to leverage the open API of Cisco Spark to find integrations to simplify the workday. Google Calendar, Jive, Trello, Box and more can be integrated with Spark to allow fully unified experienced. I advise you to check it on https://depot.ciscospark.com as well the very interesting http://sameroom.io as well.

•  Spark Hybrid Media Service:

Spark Hybrid will give customers the option to deploy Cisco Spark meetings on premises, in the cloud, or even both at the same time. not sure if it would be integrated with the Flex Plan eventually, but it might be.

• Cisco Business Edition 4000 :

With the same strategic direction in Cloud-based Collaborations, Cisco introducing Cisco BE4K targeting the Small-to-Medium-Business (SMB) sitting alongside Cisco UCM Express, Cisco BE6K, and Meraki MC. As announced, it will support 8800 and 7800 Cisco Line of IP Phones. Features like: Make, receive, park, hold and transfer calls.Auto-attendant for effective call routing, Voicemail, Hunt groups, and Audio Conference will be offered here.

With a feature of zero-touch deployment (from the customer perspective) the BE4K can automatically download its configuration from the Cloud once plugged-in into the remote site Network. I will try to find some more information on the specification and operation of the new introduced BE.

• Cisco Business Edition 6000 pre-configured before shipment:

With the same approach, Cisco is improving its management tools for Partners in ordering Cisco BE6K to have a lot of the installation workload done before shipment to customer’s site. Cisco claims it will save up to 60% of the workload. I believe we need here more information about this scope as well.

Please checkout Gary Wolfson Blog on Cisco blogs on the link http://blogs.cisco.com/partner/collaboration-just-got-simpler-and-more-flexible

Ok, Not totally “zero touch”, but you will get the idea.

Hello, It is the time of the year again :).  And no I don’t mean Thanksgiving, but the time of a fresh upgrade to your IP Phones. Planning to upgrade Cisco phones seems got a lot easier without the cost and complexity of rolling out phones and cost of Field operation rollout . UnifiedFX (unifiedFX.com) the developer of the UC tool PhoneView, introduces MigrationFX. 

From the functionality point of view, it is as simple as unplug the old Cisco IP Phone (like 7941) and plug the same cable (should be the same cable/port) with a new IP Phone (lets say the unique Cisco IP  8845) , and the new IP Phone get identified to be a replaceable IP Phone and move all the old phone profile with original line settings and IP Phones device settings (common profiles at least).  You can see a demo in the following video:

UnifiedFX states that  all Cisco Customers can get a free “Site” License of MigrationFX from Cisco in trad-in of Old phones and purchase a min of 100 new Phones. Orderable by the Promo code: L-CP-MGFX-PROMO=. There is a Free Trial you can download for Lab validation Environment.

In a future post, I will highlight the technical details of the operation of the Zero-Touch MigrationFX and how it is integrated to the system. Highlighting the potential cost saving. So stay tight for our future deep dive.

Note: I absolutely have no affiliation with UnifiedFX and highlighting this product here is merely to the share a useful tool that for sure improve IP Phones migrations to the customers and partners.

🙂

Hello there,

Here is the final part of the first Series of Cisco Expressway – Design overview. In Part 4 we highlight the Design Considerations of Expressway including Service Discovery, Directory Search, and regional and global design. We highlight as well what will be covered in the next parts of the series.

Your feedback on the all series is appreciated as well. What is good and what is need to be mitigated. I really appreciate your feedback.

Also For any question or Enquiry, please Comment.

Thanks

In Part 3 we talk about Cisco Expressway Mobile and Remote Access Licensing and Sizing. How to design a scalable Expressway solution for several organisation sizes. This is an important Part. Enjoy

For any question or Enquiry, please post in the comment here or on Youtube

Thanks