Voice design Question and Suggestion

[jimmy.yeung]

We are running UCM 6.1 and 2 sites are in the States, NY and CA. NY has the publisher and CA has the subscriber. We are planning to build a new site in China with about 60 users. Their will only be a DS3 between CA and China via MPLS cloud. The requirements in China is able to dial out locally and able to dial to the CA and NY office with internal dialing. We are planning to delpoy CME and CUE on 3945 router in China. Should we deploy a whole new publisher to get the same user experience in China as the users in NY and CA? Thanks.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

This question leaves at least an hour's worth of discussion points on the table to fully vet this decision out. A few considerations off the top of my head:

• How big is the China office? At some point the phone licenses for CME make at UCM-BE cheaper.
  The new UCM-BE 6000 has eliminated the BE-specific software installation and licensing models which make it easy to expand a small deployment into a larger cluster.
• Are you planning on adding other APAC offices?
• Do users move between APAC and NA offices (Cross-Cluster Extension Mobility)?
• Is the customer's staff comfortable maintaining two different PBX systems?
• Do you foresee other UC applications (Cisco or third-party) being added in the future?
  • Video? At the moment CUCM 8.5 has the edge on video signaling inter-working.

Most user-facing call agent functionality from CUCM exists in CCME. My default is to choose CUCM; however, CCME is typically a very capable PBX so I'm purposely trying not to discredit it here.

[jimmy.yeung]

Hello Jonathan,

Thank you for getting back! Here's some answer to the questions.

• How big is the China office? At some point the phone licenses for CME make at UCM-BE cheaper.
  The new UCM-BE 6000 has eliminated the BE-specific software installation and licensing  models which make it easy to expand a small deployment into a larger  cluster.
  

Ans: We are looking at 60 plus users and open to expansion.

• Are you planning on adding other APAC offices?

Ans: No

• Do users move between APAC and NA offices (Cross-Cluster Extension Mobility)?

Ans: Users from CA will travel to China on and off and would like to have Cross-Cluster Extension Mobility.

• Is the customer's staff comfortable maintaining two different PBX systems?

Ans: Yes

• Do you foresee other UC applications (Cisco or third-party) being added in the future?
  • Video? At the moment CUCM 8.5 has the edge on video signaling inter-working.

Ans: We will have teleprecence for NY, CA, and China office.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Ok, based on that my recommendation would be a BE-6000 which will come with some basic UCL-based licenses of UCM and Unity Connection. You can upgrade it to UWL or add other applications such as CUBAC if desired since it will be on a VMware ESXi-based UCS C200M2 server.

The CTS codec cannot register to CME. Additionally, cross-cluster extension mobility can only occur between CUCM clusters. If you are using Local Route Groups you'll want to run 8.5 because starting in that version cross-cluster extension mobility will use the LRG for more efficient call routing.

Please rate helpful posts.

[jimmy.yeung]

Jonathan,

Thank you for getting back so quickly. Much appreciated! We'll look into it.

Thanks,

Jimmy