Largest Microsoft Teams / Cisco Hybrid UC Environment – Enabled by VOSS
March 4, 2021
Henry Barton, VP Strategy, VOSS Solutions
Many of our UCaaS cloud partners have end customers who are adopting Microsoft Teams for collaboration while continuing to exploit their sophisticated voice infrastructure on Cisco or Avaya. Being able to deliver a simple integrated solution to the end customer and having a single portal to manage both technology platforms is a critical need for all UCaaS providers.
VOSS hit a major milestone this week that I wanted to share with you. We commenced the operational roll-out of integrated Microsoft Teams and Cisco services for a VOSS cloud partner, at one of their most prestigious multinational customers – a large financial services company.
Their requirement? To quickly and efficiently build a multi-vendor UCaaS environment, where employees could access Microsoft Teams collaboration tools alongside their existing Cisco and Avaya UC applications and services. The financial services company wanted the roll-out of this project to be seamless – ensuring zero impact to business – and secure. Another stipulation was that VOSS carried out the project in a cohesive, coordinated, and integrated manner, to ensure repeatability at future sites.
The integration project at the Financial Services company was designed to ensure that MS-Teams Enterprise voice could be jointly managed alongside existing UC services, with Direct Routing into the service provider’s hosted UC platform (Cisco and Avaya).
When we carry out projects of this kind, we ensure that the service provider and their customer can continue to utilize their existing UC infrastructure, augmenting this with MS-Teams services in the same sites, sharing the same number ranges and dial plan management. This guarantees the best return on investment – from both legacy and new applications, and furnishes employees with the latest collaboration tools to keep productivity high and end user experience positive. On the technical side, it requires simultaneous provisioning of both Cisco and Microsoft services, with fully automated Powershell scripting used to read and update Microsoft services.
The project has gone well – with deployment in ten sites in multiple countries. The integrated Cisco/Microsoft environment is now fully in production, all underpinned and managed by a single administrative interface from VOSS. For the financial services company, this means that they can start ramping up MS-Teams voice services across the rest of the organization, using the same, trusted, highly automated and repeatable process.
This is not the only use case for the coexistence of Microsoft Teams plus legacy UC technology. We are seeing growing demand from enterprises looking to deploy MS-Teams Enterprise Voice alongside their existing Cisco and Avaya UC services.
Supporting this at scale with synchronisation of over 120,000 Office365 Users and 55,000 MS-Teams accounts has been an important test case for us; together with dealing with the demanding requirements of the customer for a rapid roll-out of MS-Teams on a large scale.
In the process, we have seen rapidly evolving ‘real-world’ MS-Teams management requirements which we are specifically targeting with our latest VOSS-4-UC multi-vendor service management architecture. And, both the service provider and customer administrators get to manage their combined services from a ‘single pane of glass’.
Our next development phase is just as exciting. We are currently extending the VOSS-4-UC management platform to offer VOSS Assurance and Analytics, to simultaneously monitor and health-check Cisco and Microsoft services, at scale.
This is almost impossible to do without a fully integrated multi-vendor management and assurance and analytics platforms. We are delighted that our VOSS architecture is so well aligned to support large scale deployments like this.
To find out more about this project, please get in touch.
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