Five Ways the Cloud is Better in 2020 with Cisco UCM Cloud

So much has happened, since we announced Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) Cloud one year ago. The interest and competitive wins we are seeing with Cisco UCM Cloud have validated the demand for enterprise-class features and performance made possible by a Cisco cloud UC service based on the Unified CM technology. Through an aggressive product roadmap and active engagement with customers and partners, we have enhanced our UCM Cloud service in many ways, over the past year. I would like to share the five most interesting ones in this blog post.

Cloud Anywhere

Last year, we introduced UCM Cloud with availability in the US and Canada. Now the service is available for sale in more than 60 countries, with remote office support globally, to countries not under embargo by the United States federal government.

We’ve expanded our data center locations beyond North America, to include EMEA and the Asia-Pacific regions, making enterprise-grade, secure cloud UC and collaboration services available wherever you need it.

Administrative Simplicity

Cisco has been consolidating administration control of our collaboration applications and devices to deliver a single-pane-of-glass administration experience within the Cisco Webex Control Hub. Collaboration workloads, like meetings and messaging, as well as device management of phones, headsets, and room devices are already managed from Control Hub.

Later this quarter, we plan to integrate UCM Cloud into Webex Control Hub. We will start by providing analytics about your service, intelligent insights, and usage metrics. Over time we expect to add much more to simplify and streamline UCM Cloud administration alongside your other Cisco collaboration workloads.

UCM Cloud into Webex Control Hub

Migration Efficiency

For customers currently using an on-premises UCM solution, I have some very exciting news. This month, we introduced the Cisco UCM Cloud Migration Assistant, which provides the ability to simplify and automate the on-premises UCM system migrations to UCM Cloud. The Migration Assistant can automatically extract users, calling features, and system settings and replicate them in UCM Cloud, but is also powerful enough so you can customize the migration and transform the information into a new optimized cloud configuration. The Migration Assistant provides flexibility for you to schedule and migrate users on a site by site basis, and also performs synthetic call testing to validate that sites and their users have been correctly configured and their features are working as expected.

Image of Migration Efficiency in on-prem UCM solution

In summary, the Migration Assistant will greatly reduce the time and effort involved in migrating your on-premises UCM systems to the cloud.

PSTN Connecting Options

UCM Cloud supports multiple options for connecting to the PSTN, including partner-bundled PSTN services and on-premises local gateway to break out to the PSTN. Today we are announcing a new PSTN connection option through pre-interconnected PSTN from one of Cisco’s Cloud-Connected PSTN provider partners. This new Cloud-Connected PSTN Provider program for UCM Cloud is now available globally. Check here for country and provider availability.

License Flexibility

One last point I want to cover pertains to the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan. The Collaboration Flex Plan offers the ultimate license flexibility to move calling workloads from on-premises to the cloud under one subscription. We will be announcing new enhancements to the Collaboration Flex Plan shortly, which will bring simplicity and savings to our customers. Watch for updates here.

I am so excited about the momentum we are seeing as our Cisco UCM customers, as well as customers on legacy UC platforms, choose UCM Cloud as their trusted path to the cloud for UC. I look forward to sharing additional UCM Cloud enhancements with you over the coming months.