VOSS Solutions has told OSS News Review about the general availability of UC On-Boarding Toolset (OBT).

VOSS UC-OBT is a suite of VOSS tools and services that provides customers with specialist support to rapidly on-board locations, end users, and their UC devices and services to new UC collaboration platforms. OBT is the latest variant of the VOSS User Deployment Toolset, building on broad field experience gathered in the last two years, and extensive development; including support for a 2,000 site, 80,000 phone and 120,000 user deployment project at a major European Telco.

OBT is specifically designed to interwork with the HCS fulfillment toolset, CUCDM (Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager versions 8.1.0, 8.1.1 and 8.1.2), and it is already being adopted by a number of global Cisco HCS partners to mass migrate their end customers, end users, phones and services, by streamlining input from legacy Cisco Call Managers and TDM PBXs, and by managing the migration process from existing VOSS-managed Cisco-UC platforms.

A global Communications Service Provider and Cisco HCS partner has been the beachhead customer for OBT. This CSP has recently deployed over 16,000 users and phones on their Cisco HCS platform. Volume growth is now at 6,000 phones per month, with OBT helping to accelerate deployment rates. The use of OBT with this HCS partner demonstrates particular potential, as it already spans four end customers, across more than a dozen countries; all with significant customization requirements and demanding migration schedules.

The VOSS On-Boarding Toolset runs on a Linux-based VM-server and uses sophisticated ‘Extract-Transform-Load’ (ETL) data warehousing logic to extract data from multiple data sources, such as XLSX and CSV spread sheet files, Cisco Call Managers PBX AXL and SQL queries, Cisco-UCDM SOAP queries, and LDAP/AD directories. Extensibility is also provided to support SQL export from Native PBX discovery systems. OBT then transforms and enriches the data, based on customizable ETL logic, and allows service providers and their customers to stage and view. Finally, OBT automates the batch-loading of locations and all user and phone services via direct API-loading into Cisco UCDM. As a result, UC customers can be migrated significantly faster, by smaller, more productive deployment teams. In addition, there is an overall improvement in data accuracy, which can significantly reduce project risk and decrease re-work costs, whilst improving customer satisfaction levels.

Henry Barton, VP Operations Strategy at VOSS, commented; “We are really excited by this latest extension to our VOSS UC-OBT capabilities, and by our experience with using this toolset in the field. Effectively managing large UC deployment projects is always a major challenge for service providers. We believe that OBT offers service providers a step-change in how they migrate their customers and offer a source of real differentiation versus more manual and time-consuming on-boarding strategies.”