NTT, Cisco Webex Team To Further Cloud Calling Migration

Cisco and NTT will be migrating up to 2 million of their joint customers off Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution and premises-based telephony environments. Webex Calling, the tech giant’s cloud-based offering, is the destination.

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Cisco Systems is teaming up with its longtime partner NTT to migrate legacy customers to Cisco’s flagship Webex cloud calling and collaboration platform.

Specifically, the two companies have a goal of transitioning up to 2 million users who are joint Cisco and NTT customers into the cloud and off their Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), or premises-based voice environments. The shift will help businesses adapt to a true as-a-service hybrid working setup, said Kristyn Hogan, vice president of global collaboration partner sales for San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

“Together, Cisco and NTT share what is one of the largest customer bases who [are] on HCS today, hosted, but really on-premises by NTT and resold as a managed service. We want to over the next 36 months move these joint customers with us into the Cisco Webex cloud,” Hogan said.

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NTT will be at the center of this managed service, she said. “It’s just a different model with this being a true cloud solution versus a hosted, on-premises solution.”

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The move from legacy and on-premises-based voice environments to cloud-based calling will bring telephony directly into customers’ collaboration environments and eliminate the numerous and often unpredictable costs associated with traditional PBX voice services, according to Cisco.

Customers that make the move to cloud-based voice typically achieve 40 percent to 60 percent savings on average. The savings are a result of comprehensive calling plans and a significant reduction of the total cost of ownership and capital expenditure associated with on-premises hardware, according to NTT research.

The majority of the joint Cisco/NTT customers have been consuming Cisco collaboration on-premises via a managed service. “That’s not changing—if anything, our partners’ managed services are even more important in this cloud world,” Hogan said.

Global solution provider giant NTT is bringing its managed services wrapper to the equation to make the transition to the cloud as seamless as possible to the end customer, Hogan said.

NTT’s managed services and Cisco’s cloud migration team will work together to migrate customers to calling, meetings and communications capabilities on the Cisco Webex cloud platform, which offers reliable performance with 99.99 percent uptime, according to Cisco.

Together, the two companies expect to migrate up to 2 million users from legacy platforms to a true cloud calling model over the next 36 months, Hogan said.

Cisco has been on a path to migrate its users to the cloud, albeit at their own pace, for the past several years. “One of the things we’ve seen is that to achieve the very best hybrid work experience, it’s often built on a cloud solution due to the speed and the innovation and even the cost savings that our customers can achieve with cloud,” Hogan said.

Cisco continues to expand its 30-plus-year relationship with NTT across many different technology areas. The two companies said last month that they would co-innovate to further private 5G adoption for enterprise customers and bridge the gap between operational technology and IT environments.