Cloud communications services provider
Masergy today announced Masergy UCaaS with Cisco Webex, integrating its hosted calling platform with Webex chat, content sharing, and conferencing tools.
The combination of Cisco’s collaboration capabilities into Masergy’s UCaaS portfolio is the latest in a long-evolving relationship between the two companies. Masergy, which supports cloud communications from the BroadSoft platform now owned by Cisco, has been offering Cisco-based UCaaS since 2004. For today’s user requirements, however, UCaaS alone is too limited and dated in the type of interactions supported and use as part of a business workflow, Rudy Tibuni, director of cloud communications product management at Masergy, said. One-to-one communications is fine, but today’s users also need to be able to participate in group meetings and access content easily, he added. “It was critical for us to move into something like a Webex [solution],” he said.
With the basic UC service, users have the ability to complete rudimentary tasks like create contacts and access group meetings with a softphone and dial pad. With the Webex integration, they’ll still be wielding a softphone, but will now have a single interface that serves as access to meetings, conversations, and messaging. This is the case whether accessing the UCaaS with Webex service from desktop or iOS or Android mobile device, Tibuni said.
In providing UCaaS with Webex, Masergy handles the security, networking, and management, thus reducing the burden on enterprise IT, Tibuni said. Additionally, companies can use this managed UC/collaboration service in conjunction with the managed SD-WAN and secure edge service Masergy
introduced late last year, Masergy said. Doing so will give them visibility to their application performance, UCaaS, network, and WAN edge device data from a single dashboard view, Tibuni added. They can go to the Masergy interface, click a button, and “make it all happen.”
Masergy offers the UCaaS/Webex combo in basic, standard, and premium licenses, as it does for its basic UC service.
