NWN and VOSS Team to Offer Cloud-Based Multi-Tenant Collaboration Solutions

By Laura Stotler
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Cisco partner and managed service provider (MSP) NWN and VOSS (News - Alert) Solutions have partnered to provide cloud-based, pay-by-the-device collaboration services. NWN, which offers the Cisco Hosted Collaboration solution (HCS), designs and implements managed service offerings to Cisco (News - Alert) customers in the mid-market enterprise as well as public sectors.

Service provider fulfillment platform vendor VOSS aims to simplify the design, delivery and management of collaboration services over public and private clouds. The company gives NWN (News - Alert) with a single pane of glass view to the entire HCS environment, enabling the MSP to manage multiple customers from a central point of control.

VOSS also simplifies the administration of the collaboration environment, which enables NWN to quickly deploy new customers on the Cisco platform while also rolling out new collaboration services quickly and cost effectively. This frees NWN to pursue new opportunities, and the company has a goal of retaining hundreds of thousands of handset deployments in the HCS environment within the next three years.

Additional benefits of working with VOSS include rapid deployment of new customers as well as automated, large scale on-boarding of new devices. VOSS also provides NWN with simplified roll out of new services in multi-tenant setups, across multiple customers, business units or locations. Finally, the company enables the ability to scale services without the need for NWN to increase the size of its technical team.

NWN views the hosted collaboration market as a major growth area, driven by both IP telephony and unified communications. The company aims to educate its customers about choosing an externally hosted suite of collaboration services to reduce their risks as well as set up a sustainable "cost-per-consumption" model for new services and technologies. This enables customers to add collaborative tools in an enterprise environment without significant investments in data centers or staff.

The addition of a hosted model in NWN's portfolio of managed services lets the MSP appeal to an even broader market. Existing on-premise Centrex customers can benefit from greater control and flexibility as well as enhanced functionality and features through a hosted collaborative model. And customers using legacy Cisco systems who need to upgrade have an easy and cost-effective migration path to next-generation collaboration services.

For those customers who prefer a hybrid model, the HCS platform enables new collaboration services from the cloud while allowing customers to maintain on-premise control of their legacy systems.

"Collaboration services have become so complex in recent years, that customers want to relinquish control of their telephony environment to NWN, as we have the technical knowledge, the experts, and the time to manage these services for them," said Drew Phelps, vice president of NCare Managed Services at NWN. "Without an application like VOSS, NWN would not be able to deliver multi-tenant management, and therefore would not be able to offer a cloud-based hosted collaboration service.”

"The management of cloud-based, multi-tenant services must provide ease of use for both the service provider and the customer," said Tim Salapek, director of hosted collaboration services at NWN. "With the VOSS application, NWN hosted collaboration can turn up customers quickly and manage them efficiently once in service, and with the secure management portal NWN can empower our customers who wish to manage certain aspects of their service directly."

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Edited by Brooke Neuman