October 21, 2014
With the release of CUCM 10.0, I thought it would be beneficial to share what new capabilities are now bundled into this release, at no charge. In my opinion, there is significant functionality that is now built into the Cisco offering that previously required a significant capital cost.
So, what exactly am I talking about here? Well, products called Expressway Core and Expressway Edge are now just given to all Cisco customers (new or existing) who run Cisco Unified Communications Manager 10.0 and above. In the recent past, (prior to 10.0) customers who wanted to experience Cisco’s full video/collaboration/Telepresence offerings had to purchase Cisco VCS Control and Cisco VCS Expressway applications which cumulatively totaled about $45,000 dollars list price! In my opinion, this is a great decision by Cisco because it makes it easy for existing customers to stick with Cisco and/or eliminates the capital cost barrier to entry for customers who have video initiatives.
What exactly do Expressway Core and Expressway Edge give a customer the ability to do?
Expressway Core and Expressway Edge open the door for the following technical functions:
Cisco Jabber Mobile Remote Access
Ability for Cisco Jabber users outside of the network/firewall to have full Jabber Softphone/Video/IM capabilities from anywhere on the Internet without a VPN client.
Cisco Jabber Guest
This is a consumer-to-business (C2B) video/unified communications solution that extends the reach of Cisco’s enterprise telephony to people outside of a corporate firewall who do not have phones registered with Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
B2B Video
This allows your company to be able to conduct business-to-business video communications with any other company that has a standards based SIP or H.323/H.264 endpoint.
Collaboration Meeting Room (formerly Cisco WebEx Enabled Telepresence)
Ability to attain full Unified Communications/Video Collaboration/Screen Sharing Experience between WebEx guests/users and Telepresence endpoints.
Are there still any use cases for the traditional VCS Control and VCS Expressway?
The only cases that warrant the traditional Cisco VCS Control/Expressway are the following:
- Customer is not a Cisco voice customer and has no plans to be
- Customer has 3rd party video points that they want to register such as Polycom or Lifesize. The Expressway Core no longer registers any video points so all registrations go through the Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and currently the CUCM can’t register 3rd party endpoints
- Cisco Jabber for Movi
Now that all registration is pointed to the CUCM, what type of licenses will I need?
- Customers will need a Cisco Telepresence Endpoint Meeting Room license for each room-based video endpoint
- Cisco Jabber clients will just leverage traditional Enhanced or CUWL Standard licensing
- Customers will need (2) Rich Media Session licenses for every video call that’s not between video endpoints registered to the CUCM 10.0. So, for example, a B2B video call would require (2) Rich Media Session licenses (1 for the Expressway Core and 1 for Expressway Edge).
If you’re interested in experiencing enhanced video, collaboration, and telepresence capabilities, it’s the perfect time to consider upgrading to CUCM 10.0.
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For Further Reading:
Simplifying CUCM Upgrade and Migration Tasks Using Cisco PCD – Prime Collaboration Deployment