Cisco HCS-SP is a highly scalable, carrier-grade architecture, based on Cisco’s virtualized servers (UCS), designed for the service provider market. Cisco HCS-SP enables CSPs to better deliver cloud and managed services to multiple customers, each with dedicated infrastructure and applications.
These CSPs are able to support their customers’ existing IP investments, rather than force the customer into a rip and replace hosted “Centrex” model. Each customer can be provided with an advanced suite of collaboration services on a dedicated basis, providing higher levels of individual customization.
In addition, HCS-SP supports deployment models that deliver cloud-based (hosted) collaboration services to customers’ existing managed IP telephony infrastructure.
VOSS has entered into an OEM relationship with Cisco, to provide the fulfillment management for Cisco HCS-SP. Within HCS-SP, the VOSS technology is called Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager (Cisco UCDM). UCDM is a collaboration fulfillment platform that allows the MSP to manage both types of customer deployments, including the various disparate network elements, from the same platform.
The Cisco HCS-SP architecture is not new; it is an evolution of the Cisco hosted service provider solution (HUCS) architecture, which has been in operation for over five years. Cisco and its ecosystem partners, including VOSS, bring many years of experience to bear on the design and testing of this latest end-to-end managed service provider architecture. Cisco offers new commercial models with HCS-SP, such as “pay by the drink”, rather than the traditional up front capital investment.
Cisco HCS-SP has four major components:
- The full suite of Cisco’s advanced, enterprise collaboration services, including messaging, mobility, presence and social media applications - to ensure that CSPs can deliver the latest collaboration features
- Cisco’s unified computer system (UCS) platform - virtualization in the data center - to deliver a more cost effective and efficient hardware platform to support large scale, multi-customer, managed services
- An ecosystem of 3rd party management systems (including VOSS) - called MS2 - which delivers a pre-integrated OSS management capability based on the TM Forum’s NGOSS architecture. This will enable service providers to deliver seamless flow-through provisioning, order management and billing
- Integrated call aggregation and central gateways to enable MSPs to offer advanced trunking capabilities, including SIP trunking, combined with Cisco’s market leading SRST capability for local breakout resilience
HCS-SP provides the foundation to delivering multiple managed services, not just collaboration. Future managed services will include data and security, as an integrated package of managed services, removing the historic product silos from within the service provider.
