What Does It Take to Transition Your HCS Platform from CUCDM to VOSS-4-UC?
July 25, 2019
Maretha Lindeque, Customer Success Service Manager: EMEA, VOSS Solutions
With the end-of-life for CUCDM getting closer, time is running out for CUCDM customers to choose their preferred replacement UC domain management platform, and then migrate their existing estates across to the new platform.
While VOSS-4-UC may be one of the many options available, this blog post aims to show why moving to VOSS-4-UC is the safest, quickest and best choice, as well as providing a description of what to expect when transitioning from CUCDM to VOSS-4-UC.
The key benefit of VOSS-4-UC over any of the other choices is stability and continuity for both your end customers and your internal operations, product, and engineering teams. VOSS-4-UC is an evolution from CUCDM rather than a rip and replace strategy, and it embodies the historical strengths and proven production capabilities of CUCDM, overcomes CUCDM’s historic weaknesses, and provides loads of new capabilities. Below is a summarized list of the distinctive features of VOSS-4-UC which have encouraged customers to transition to VOSS-4-UC since the inception of this program*:
- True multi-tenancy and multi-vendor capabilities
- A range of platform adaptations that can match the specialised customer requirements
- Integration with third party tools
- Powerful API in VOSS-4-UC enables integration with third party applications to provide end-to-end flow-through provisioning
- Access to VOSS M2UC, direct VOSS support and our extended customer success program**
- Ease of transitioning to VOSS-4-UC, saving partners money
Image: VOSS-4-UC: Single Point of Integration
Once you have chosen VOSS-4-UC, the next question is how complex and impactful will the transition be? The honest answer is that this depends! If you are already on CUCDM Evolution and are happy with your deployment model and your dial plans, it is a simple upgrade that can be done over a weekend. At the other extreme, as VOSS starts engaging directly with partners, we sometimes find that the way the HCS platform was originally deployed and set up is suboptimal. Deployed dial plans may no longer be appropriate and folks are stuck on very old versions of CUCDM Classic. The good news is that VOSS has substantial experience gained transitioning over 1 million seats to VOSS-4-UC already and these successful projects have spanned the entire spectrum of partners with super complex objectives to those that are simple and done quickly.
Image: VOSS-4-UC User Interface
Like any other project, when transitioning to VOSS-4-UC – no matter what your business objectives are or which version of CUCDM you move from – the key to success is a) understanding what your final outcome should be, b) planning how to get there, and c) working with an experienced transition partner and proven transition tools.
CUCDM Evolution
Transitioning from CUCDM Evolution (versions 10.x and 11.x) – This process is similar to an upgrade to another version of CUCDM, except that you have the added benefit of accessing a multitude of additional features, and direct support from the VOSS Customer Success team.
As with any upgrade, conducting a due diligence beforehand is critical and vital to a successful process.
This due diligence should include:
- Scoping the requirement to understand if any adaptations or integration work is required
- Finding out what the best upgrade path is to follow
- Making sure that the system is in a good state and performing maintenance where required and
- Putting together a MOP which is simple to run through during the upgrade
Some customers may choose to deploy VOSS-4-UC on a new cluster with new dial plans and to address some of the historic platform configuration issues that they have. This of course provides them with the opportunity to start afresh. This process is more similar to the process required to migrate from CUCDM Classic.
CUCDM Classic
Migrating from CUCDM Classic (versions 8.x) to VOSS-4-UC does require more effort and planning, but when done correctly, this migration is also a great opportunity to clean up old data and start from a clean slate.
As many of our customers can affirm, our global services team has the tools and experience to allow for a smooth and simple migration experience. A typical migration experience with VOSS global services includes:
- A due diligence on the data and customer dial plan
- Develop rules to clean your data
- Using these rules we then extract this data into M2UC, which will allow us to populate VOSS-4UC with the data from CUCDM
- Further configure VOSS-4-UC and prepare HCM-F
- Perform an Overbuild using M2UC and our advanced overbuild capabilities
This process supports batched migrations which allows for multiple customer migrations in a single maintenance window, allowing you to speed up the overall migration process. We also have the ability to migrate customers without the need to migrate dial plans, therefore mitigating the migration risk factor as well as avoiding technical complexity during migration.
Image: VOSS-4-UC User Interface
In conclusion, once you have chosen to migrate to VOSS-4-UC from CUCDM, the transition process should not be feared; we will walk the path with you, supporting you every step of the way. As VOSS, we are here to help, and we have a plethora of experienced services available to assist you through this process
To find out more about transitioning from CUCDM to VOSS-4-UC, please read about the H.O.M.E program or contact us.
* This information was summarized using VOSS press releases
** Keep an eye out for my next blog which will talk about our new extended customer success experience
Read how some of our customers have transitioned from CUCDM to VOSS-4-UC:
