Call Accounting Gets a Boost from Cisco/Microsoft Partnership
July 22, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
What’s the best way to gain access to the cloud? It may be through the partnership of two key players. When giants like Microsoft (News - Alert) and Cisco join forces, the market sits up and pays attention. The two have entered into a three years agreement that covers sales and go-to-market collaboration to deliver integrated cloud and data center services for enterprise customers.
In the first year, the two companies plan to focus their efforts on France, Germany, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. For enterprises in these countries, teams from both Microsoft and Cisco (News - Alert) will help to migrate Windows 2003 users to Windows 2012 R2 on the Cisco UCS platform. This partnership couldn’t have come at a better time as support for both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 will end in July of 2015.
This news was recently reported by call accounting solutions provider, ISI (News - Alert). The company pointed out in a blog post that both companies would be making investments in marketing, sales and engineering resources. As part of this plan, the two companies will integrate technologies across datacenter and cloud markets, including SQL Server, Cisco Nexus switches, Cisco UCS, Microsoft Cloud OS, Windows Server, System Center and Microsoft Azure.
“From innovative technologies and global brands to specialized channel partners, Cisco and Microsoft have the ingredients to transform the traditional datacenter,” said Frank Palumbo, senior vice-president, Global Data Center and Virtualization Sales, Cisco, in the ISI post.
Under this agreement, Microsoft will integrate services while Cisco stays focused on the private cloud, service provider, server migration and SQL Server 2014. Integrated infrastructure services from Cisco will include FlexPod. Plus, future releases of the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure and Cisco InterCloud Fabric will be readily integrated with Microsoft cloud services.
So what does this have to do with call accounting or a company like ISI? The good news is ISI already has the capabilities in place to support recording, reporting and voice traffic management needs for Microsoft and Cisco communication platforms. This support even extends to mixed environments, completely supporting this new partnership.
As more and more companies are embracing the opportunities afforded in the cloud, they need a way to still monitor and manage activities so the promised benefits remain intact. With a proven call accounting partner, these enterprises can better control activity and spending so they can truly see the benefits associated with cloud-based activities.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi