ICM instance

[user-cisco]

hi

can someone clarify the concept of instance in ICM, as known An instance is a single logical ICM. and one must

have set up at least one ICM instance before installing ICM components.

and multiple instances can be installed on a single computer. ICM has a

limitation of 25 instances per machine.

so, can one instance be configured and considered as an ICM for customer 1, and a second ICM instance for customer 2, and a third ICM instance for customer 3, so on...

if yes, then this is an outsourcing model, right? but as i know an enterprise edition is not an outsoursing model?!

or is it meant by an instance a grou or groups of ICM components for one IPCCE ssytem for a particular company?!

please advise?

thanks

[jeff.marshall]

What you first decribe is correct.

If you intend to be an Outsourcer/Service Provider then you pay a specific price and get "NAM" software.

If you are a big customer with a number of business units that want to manage as individual entities (i.e. instances) then you pay a different price and get "ICM" software.

There are a few technical details relating to the Network-side ICM (called NAM Instance) and the customer-side ICM (called the CICM Instance(s)) and things like security and AW design but you distilled it down nicely.

Oh yea, don't tell anyone.

/Jeff

[user-cisco]

(If you intend to be an Outsourcer/Service Provider then you pay a specific price and get "NAM" software)

so you mean that i should move to hosted edition and enterprise does not satisfy outsourcing by its ICM instances..!

then, my question in other words, if i have enterprise edition, and there are 5 customers, each customer has his own ICM and IP-IVR and they want to connect to my ICM Ent. then is this applicable? do i need to add IPCC gateway for each customer or just i have to add ICM instance for each customer?

also, what is the added vlaue for a customer has his own ICM and IVR to connect to a ICM hosted-edition service provider?

thanks

[jeff.marshall]

You said, "so you mean that i should move to hosted edition and enterprise does not satisfy outsourcing by its ICM instances..!"

How the product is designed and functions may be dramatically different than how it is licensed and I guess that was my intention of the last post. I would suspect that if you are an outsourcer and you are providing ICM services to other customers then Cisco will be charging you NAM licensing.

To get even more basic, consider the following: There is no difference between 5 ICM customers with 5 ICM systems installed on separate servers than 5 ICM customers with 5 Instances installed on the same servers - they're still not communicating with each other. One is a stand-alone model and the other is a semi-hosted model but they are very much independent entities. One has the physical boundaries of server separation and the other has the logical boundary of instance separation.

NAM as well as using the ICM instances as you describe essentially puts you in a “command and control” mechanism over all the instances. If you just want to connect two ICM systems, i.e. you have one and a partner has one then connect them via ICM to ICM Gateway to share call routing data. If you want “command and control” then install NAM with reliant Customer ICMs.

/Jeff