Recently, my Cisco colleague Frédéric Doyle sat down with expertIP to discuss Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and Allstream’s UCaaS offering. See below for the full transcript of Frédéric’s conversation.
The Allstream hosted collaboration solution (HCS) offers Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) to Quebec and Canadian organizations. The first offering of its kind available in the country by a national telecommunications company, HCS combines a cloud delivery model and the suite of Cisco unified communications and collaboration solutions. expertIP asked Frédéric Doyle, product specialist at Cisco, to talk about the HCS solution.
How does the integration of HCS and Cisco infrastructure solutions benefit the customer?
F. Doyle: All products included in the solution are from the same manufacturer and have been designed to work together. It can therefore be managed centrally rather than piece by piece. Moreover, having uniform products makes it the most user-friendly solution, because the approach is the same for the user, it serves as a simple phone, video phone, a softphone, or any other mode of communication – from a PC or mobile device. Regardless of the use, the solution is always done on a single system.
How does this simplified management and utilization translate to the customer?
F. Doyle: It facilitates the deployment and operation of the solution, thereby reducing the costs to Allstream, and in turn, the customer. Another advantage is the technical support of all components is ensured by Cisco; in case of a problem, a solution is found quickly, which promotes business continuity. Similarly, when a feature is added it’s added to the whole and there is no patching one product to another. The integration of new features is therefore done much more easily and in greatly reduced time. All these factors result in savings for the customer. These savings are in addition to those that are characteristic of paying through a cloud model.
What types of business can this provide a solution for?
F. Doyle: For companies of all sectors and of all sizes. The solution can be used in an organization with only a few users or hundreds of users. Of course, some companies prefer to deal with some applications or features using servers located in their own premises. The HCS solution can still help these organizations, because it operates in hybrid mode, meaning that it supports certain functions while others remain in the customer’s server. A hybrid solution allows not only for traditional and cloud-based user categories, but a single user can use functions in either mode.
The ease with which we can implement a hybrid model is based primarily on the fact that the HCS solution is in all respects similar to the solution installed at the customer. On the other hand, this provides the necessary controls to operate this model because it is an end to end solution, consisting of products from a single manufacturer.
To learn more about Allstream’s Hosted Collaboration Solutions, visit their website.
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