Cisco has historically targeted the enterprise market, rather than service providers. In many ways the Cisco IP telephony solution has not been suitable for the service provider market, and carriers have continued to support the more traditional telephony vendors.
This trend has changed dramitically in the past few years, with most service providers now providing a Managed Cisco UCM solution to their customers. This is despite the lack of suitability of Cisco traditional enterprise voice technology.
The reason for this change has been the dominance of Cisco in the enterprise IP voice space. Carriers and managed service providers has seen the need to cater to the demand coming from their customer base for Cisco voice products.
In recognition of this demand from the service provider market, Cisco launched a HUCS platform.
The Cisco Hosted – Unified Communications Services (HUCS) solution is a particular super-set of Cisco's voice products that addresses the specific needs of service providers who wish to either manage or host the converged network infrastructure and services.
Cisco has selected VOSS as a development partner for their HUCS architecture for service providers, and VOSS is tailored specifically for it, as it provides an integrated provisioning and application management capability.
The following diagram provides a high-level construct of the overall architecture and demonstrates the strategic nature of the VOSS solution:
