Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ SVP Cloud Transformation Andrew Pryfogle talks about the Cisco HCS platform architecture with West’s Director of Channel Operations. Find out more about how professional, managed services can help customers integrate new technologies from Wade and the West team here: http://west.cloudservicesuniversity.com/
| Andrew: | All right, guys. Another Ask the Experts session. I’ve invited Wade Wing, who’s the Director of Channel Operations with WestIP, back to the studio. He’s been here many times. Wade, welcome, man. |
| Wade: | Thank you, Andrew. Glad to be here. |
| Andrew: | All right. Always great to have you. I want to talk about the platform architecture that you guys are standardizing on now. You’ve always been Cisco-based from your inception in 2000, but you’re now really embracing Cisco’s strategy around HCS. It’s Cisco’s move into kind of the service provider community, and it’s been really interesting to see. There’s been some starts and stops with some companies but, man, you guys have really hit your stride with it. Talk about the success you’re having with HCS, and then I’m really interested to see where do you go next with Cisco HCS. Speak to that. |
| Wade: | All right. For us, we certainly had a hosted voice solution that, like you said, was very centric to Cisco in a lot of ways prior to Cisco’s release of hosted collaboration or HCS. And that’s always been, like I said, a big focus for us. Because we’ve been focused on enterprise business long-term, when HCS came to the marketplace it was really easy for us to enter it into our overall business today. We’ve always been focused on enterprises business. HCS is definitely a fit for that in price-base. It wasn’t a matter of having to remake anything we’re doing. I mean, certainly there’s some technical things to get incorporated in the platform. But it allowed us to hit the ground running with HCS, and bring all that other expertise that we’ve developed over the years to ensure a good deployment, a long-term happy customer. |
| Yeah, we’re continuing to invest in HCS. We’re continuing to invest in the things that make our version of HCS a bit unique in the marketplace. Today within the company, the West companies, we offer the largest WebX resell in the world. The largest, like I said, obviously the largest deployment of HCS to date. Collaboration meeting room is a part of our offering available today. But long-term, this year we’re expecting to add Cisco’s contact center solution. Cisco has a variety of different versions of contact center. This one is actually referred to as Cisco’s HCS for meeting room or for collab contact center. We’ll be adding to the platform pretty soon, because there’s a lot of clients out there in the marketplace who . . . They want hosted offerings, but they want the comfort of knowing that Cisco name is backing up the technology. Or they also have a lot of investments in other Cisco technologies today, and any hosted offering that they want they might want to put in place, they want to make sure that there’s going to be ability to integrate with those existing . . . | |
| Andrew: | Of course. That’s where Cisco’s really going with this, right? They’re putting a lot of money in R&D, and ongoing development, and investment into the HCS platform. New features, new capabilities that you’ll continue to build onto this as time goes by. |
| Wade: | Yeah. Absolutely. |
| Andrew: | That’s awesome, Wade. We’re excited about the HCS strategy with you guys. We’re seeing some significant wins with you guys in that category, and it’s great to have you guys in the portfolio. Thanks for jumping in, man. |
| Wade: | Absolutely. Thank you. |
| Andrew: | Good deal. Guys, that’s Wade Wing. He’s the Director of Channel Operations for WestIP, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Cisco HCS service provider in the world. Again, one of our go-to providers in our portfolio. Make sure you check out their learning center. There’s a lot of information there that you can study up on to get really smart about how to position Cisco HCS and West IP specifically for your large UCaaS opportunities. Good selling. |
