Cisco is the leading supplier of IP equipment, including IP telephony (IPT). Their history as the pre-eminent expert in IP has enabled them to compete effectively with the traditional voice vendors, who have had to make the transition to data.
The following diagram shows a typical Cisco IP voice solution architecture as supplied to many enterprise customers around the world:
Service fulfillment requirements for Cisco’s traditional enterprise architecture have historically been performed by specialist IPT systems engineers without automation. For this traditional enterprise IPT architecture (Call Manager plus gateways), there is little requirement for automation as the system can be configured on Day-1 and then any moves/ads/changes, for both central and remote sites, can be managed manually by an engineer using the specialized Cisco tools.
The same cannot be said for more advanced, large scale IPT architectures for complex enterprise customers and service providers, nor for customers wishing to launch UC.
Larger, more complex architectures with UC applications quickly become too onerous, not to mention cost prohibitive, even for highly specialized engineers.
Companies operating traditional Cisco UCM architectures, who wish to launch UC services, or scale their business, require an investment in management automation.