Node4 announced that it has selected VOSS Solutions UC management technology to manage its Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) Shared Architecture and Hybrid HCS-Spark environments – in addition to the management of its current Cisco HCSv11.5 platform.

Launched in 2004, Node4 is a leading UK-based Managed Service Provider, offering scalable end-to-end IT solutions, all fully-managed and deployed over its own infrastructure. Node4’s competencies include colocation, managed hosting, cloud servers, WAN connectivity, SIP trunking, and hosted UC telephony.

The new shared architecture will allow Node4 to reach out to medium enterprises and smaller customers (SMEs), and makes Node4 one of the first Cisco HCS providers that can deliver to this market. Node4 will bring an enterprise grade collaboration experience delivered from the cloud, to customers with as few as 30 seats and at a price point within their budget.

Normally, customers of this size would be forced to compromise on the technology choice, or would be forced to purchase on premise or managed services, rather than a fully hosted, CMSP certified, Cisco Powered service.

Mark Phelps, Collaboration product manager at Node4 commented; “We provide state of the art technology to help businesses access top-tier collaboration software of the quality and capability they deserve. Therefore, we wanted to be sure we were selecting the very best UC management technology for our new Shared Architecture solution. We were most impressed with the latest version of VOSS-4-UC, together with the VOSS team’s deep technical know-how of latest HCS thinking.”

The VOSS-4-UC provisioning and management solution selected by Node4 provides, from a single workflow interface, provisioning of a complete build of a customer and two sites using Shared Architecture, in just 16 minutes (100% configured); followed by automated loading of ‘full-service’ subscribers (including WebEx and Spark support) in a further 6 minutes – getting to service go-live in under 30 minutes.

The solution:

• • Simplifies end user on-boarding and provisioning, reducing the cost and time it takes to bring new customers onto the platform
• • Automates critical business process, to improve end user experience and speed time to resolution
• • Standardises workflows, which promotes repeatability, eliminates manual error, and streamlines administration processes

Henry Barton

During the selection process, Node4 completed a comprehensive trial before choosing VOSS over another HCS-OPA provisioning platform provider. The brief was to build, test and deliver a live, multi-country, multi-customer HCS-Shared-Architecture environment, together with Hybrid HCS-Spark and WebEx management support.

Mike Frayne, CEO at VOSS Solutions, commented: “Our understanding of the business challenges that cloud service providers experience, our superior technology that has been broadly deployed in production throughout the world, and our long and deep understanding of the HCS architecture contributed to our success at Node4.”

Henry Barton, VP Operations Strategy at VOSS and Node4 Solution Architect, added: “Node4 has a highly knowledgeable, agile and demanding technical team. They were extremely diligent in laying down the requirements for this solution: to manage a full suite of multi-tenant shared architecture Cisco v11.5 UC apps and HCM-F servers, Cisco Collaboration Edge, Imagicle UC app and OpenLDAP servers plus links to their WAN and PSTN network and Cisco-Spark.

This was a valuable opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities relative to those of other OPA players. VOSS performed strongly in all areas and we are delighted that Node4 has chosen to deliver this with VOSS.”

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