Cisco HCS Dedicated vs Shared Instance

[Muhammad Asjad]

Dears,

What are the main differences between Dedicated & Shared instance for HCS?

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

You should ask the provider that is drawing that distinction. The purpose of HCS is to host the traditional on-premise Cisco Collaboration products such as CUCM in a carrier-grade environment, typically with a private WAN connection into the customer's network. The provider manages the environment and Cisco applications so the customer doesn't have to.

[chrmay2 · Accepted solution]

HCS has traditionally been based on a "dedicated" model, where each customer has their own instance of CUCM/CUC/CUP.  This is compared to the "shared" or IP-Centrex model (e.g. Broadsoft) where all customers and configured on a common, partitioned soft-switch.

The advantages of the HCS dedicated model are overwhelming ... much richer IPPBX feature set, ability to tailor features to each customer and security of data (and much more).  

There are few advantages to the shared model ... other than cost.  A shared model means less capital cost and less footprint in the data centre.

Now Cisco is offering a "shared instance" solution for HCS.  This allows the HCS Providers to offer choice to its customers.  They can have the sophistication of cloud communications delivered as dedicated or shared.  Under the shared model, the major difference is that the Provider can offer cloud communications to much smaller enterprise customers (down to say 10 seats).

[jrobertburgoyne]

Is there a recommendation for where to buy the Cisco 8845 and associated HCS-STD-OPA-SI-USR licenses? We're interested in using https://www.intelepeer.com/ for hosted UCS + Webex for teams as our company's phone system. 

We resell Meraki, so we're a Cisco partner and have an Ingram Micro account, but we're not Cisco Collaboration qualified. 

My goal is to switch our low-cost VoIP service to Cisco 8845s with IntelePeer, but I need to first purchase the phones and licenses. 

Thank you. 

[Muhammad Asjad]

Thanks to both of you for explanation.