The Updated Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan, to Accelerate the Move to Subscription and Cloud Collaboration Services

Seamlessly Transition to the Market-Leading Webex Collaboration Suite with our Flex Plan Offer

Today, I’m excited to share major updates and enhancements to how our customers purchase the leading end-to-end collaboration solution and the commercial terms that go with it. Building off Javed’s blog from earlier today, Cisco is making it easier and more affordable than ever to seamlessly transition to subscription and cloud services with the market-leading Webex collaboration suite. Cisco Collaboration

When we first announced the Flex Plan in 2017, it was the first-of-its-kind purchasing model that offered both on-premises and cloud-based meetings, calling, and messaging capabilities in a single subscription, combined with technical support services. Since then, thousands of our customers have chosen to migrate millions of users from on-premises systems to the cloud with Flex and accelerate their digital transformation.

Consistent Offer Across their Cloud, Hosted, and On-Premises Deployments cisco collaboration

We believe that everyone should have the freedom and flexibility to migrate to the cloud on their terms and realize maximum value from their existing collaboration on-premises deployments. With Flex, customers have one consistent offer across their cloud, hosted, and on-premises deployments and can migrate when it makes sense for their business.

To support this belief, we are evolving our purchasing model to accelerate and incentivize the move to subscription and cloud services, simplify quoting and ordering for partners, and provide better together pricing with bundled discounts.

Accelerate – Incentivize the Move to Flex by Offering Additional Collaboration Functionality and a Streamlined Transition Process

With Flex, customers can migrate their existing on-premises (CUCM, BE6K, BE7K) perpetual licenses and support services (SWSS) to subscription to maintain existing on-premises coverage. Alternatively, customers can choose to migrate to the cloud and benefit from the new unified and modular Webex platform. By converting existing capex expenses to more predictable opex budgets, customers will have a more consistent buying model for their collaboration services.

This update to Flex is purely a commercial model change, intended to convert on-premises perpetual licenses to subscription. Cisco is the market leader in on-premises calling deployments and remains 100% committed to supporting on-premises calling deployments.  That means no rip-and-replace, ever! Better yet, many of the existing on-premises devices can migrate to the cloud with you or be supported in a hybrid cloud environment.

With every plan under Flex, customers get access to the Cisco Control Hub, where they can manage all their phones, video, meetings, messaging, headsets, and room devices in one Webex application, regardless of deployment type.  This newly available set of cloud services unleash the power of cloud analytics and operations dashboards for collaboration services and give users access to information that was previously unheard of. No other vendor has this or can easily replicate this.

Simplify – Streamline Quoting and Ordering with Fewer Buying Models and a Consistent Offer Across Cloud, On-Premises, and Hybrid

Many of our customers are challenged with ensuring they can respond to nonstop change while keeping their solutions up to date. With Flex, customers can freely choose between a mix of deployment models (cloud, hosted, on-premises) that best fit their specific needs. Whether you are using an on-premises perpetual license with SWSS and want to stay on-premises or are considering the move to cloud, Flex is the perfect purchasing model for you.

Better Together – New and Improved Offer Pricing with Bundled Discounts cisco collaboration

We have significantly adjusted our list prices to give you our best offer upfront for our Webex collaboration platform.  When we say significant, we mean it! We have reduced pricing by over 30% from previous offers, with additional discounts available when bundling meetings and calling or considering multi-year incentives and Enterprise Agreement offers.

We believe that Cisco is unique in providing an all-in-one collaboration solution spanning meeting, messaging, calling, and contact center with world-class integrated endpoints. With Webex, our customers can seamlessly collaborate inside and outside their organization, without worrying about security or a compromised experience, and manage it all through a single pane of glass with Cisco Webex Control Hub.

Now our Flex offer reflects the better together value that our products deliver and rewards customers for combining multiple workloads and going all-in with Cisco Webex Collaboration.

For more information, please check out our dedicated Flex page on Cisco.com or leave a comment below.

Learn More

• Webex Calling PSTN options for businesses any size, anywhere
• Count on Control Hub – a Smarter Way for IT Administrators to Manage Hybrid Work
• Webex Calling Demo: Moving UC to the Cloud