This week Cisco Live, an annual education and training event for Cisco customers and prospects, was held in sweltering Las Vegas. Co-located with the event was C-Scape, the company's global analyst meeting. In advance of arriving, I wondered whether recent financial news at Cisco would dampen the typical enthusiasm of the event. While executives did not shy away from discussing organizational simplification and re-commitment to core businesses, I would say the overall mood of the week was positive and energy remained high.
One objective measure of customers' continued commitment was Cisco Live attendance. Organizers were expecting 12,000; the final registration total was 15,000, up 21% from last year. Another 40,000 registered to attend virtually. The exhibition space, World of Solutions, was packed with 200 partners and plenty of attendees whenever I was on the show floor.
If there was one key takeaway, it was the emphasis on the cloud. Clearly any market transition that favors "as a service" solutions benefits a company whose mantra is "the network is the platform." On the exhibit floor there was a Cisco Cloud Partner Pavilion, populated not only with service provider heavy hitters BT Global Services and Qwest/CenturyLink, but systems integrators Dimension Data and CSC.
I had the opportunity to visit once again with BT Global Services' Simon Farr, who I spoke with at last year’s Cisco Live event, as well as Stephen Bruce, who heads BT’s US UC&C operation. BT proudly reports that they have 137K committed seats on Cisco Hosted Unified Communications Service (HUCS), an earlier multi-tenant version of now-flagship multi-instance Hosted Collaboration Service (HCS). Proud because BT committed to Cisco to sell 140K seats within 2.5 years and they are at 98% of goal in half that time.
I asked how BT feels about having been an early HUCS (multi-tenant) adopter now that HCS (multi-instance) is the primary direction for Cisco. Farr and Bruce explained that HUCS has been installed and is working in EMEA and North America. For the coming APAC deployment, HCS will be used and will be able to network to the existing HUCS to support global multi-national corporations. Over time, the existing HUCS solutions will migrate to HCS.
Note that BT deployed HUCS using a "build, operate, transfer" model, which offers service providers the ability to leverage Cisco to build services, operate the infrastructure or NOC and when ready or able, have management transferred to the service provider. In the case of HUCS, BT has not yet done the "transfer" and so the majority of the responsibility for the HCS transition falls to Cisco.
One chink in Cisco's cloud armor? Contact center is still not fully integrated into HUCS or HCS. In the short term, BT will deploy HUCS Agent, which will allow HUCS to deliver dial-tone/trunking support to an existing CPE contact center at a customer location. In Cisco Live sessions, Cisco positioned Unified Contact Center Enterprise integration to HCS as an end-of-year-2011 deliverable.
