RSA Security End of Sale Authentication Manager 6.1.

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15th October 2012

RSA Security End of Sale Authentication Manager 6.1

RSA Security, owned by EMC, today formally announced the End of Sale date for RSA Authentication Manager version 6.1. As version 7.x of their product has been available for a number of years, it is fair to assume the uptake on the new version hasn’t been what RSA would have wanted. Much increased hardware specifications, slower performance and a totally different, some may argue less intuitive, user interface are the main reasons why IT departments even now seem to prefer the old version.

As of November 30th 2012, new RSA customers won’t have any alternative but to order version 7.1. Existing customers on the old version will still be supported, however it is probably fair to assume that now being formally end of sale, end of support won’t be far behind.

The full announcement is available here:

Barry Hesk
Intrinsic Network Solutions

Official farewell to the Cisco Cius

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September 27th 2012

Official farewell to the Cisco Cius

After annoucing it a few months ago, Cisco have today officially “killed” the Cius tablet, acknowledging that they haven’t been able to scratch, never mind dent the iPad’s prevelence in the business marketplace. It was always going to be an uphill task for Cisco to displace the iPad even in loyal Cisco enterprise customers, however a combination of an extremely high price point, late delivery, buggy software and the fact that it’s “not Apple” have resulted in today’s final death knell.

So millions of dollars have been burnt with little to show for it. Cisco is now focusing on pushing it’s Jabber collaboration apps onto both the iPad and Android platforms.

The offical EoS article is available here:

Not much comfort for the few (and we mean few) enterprises that splashed out on it…

Barry Hesk
Intrinsic Network Solutions

Cisco Unified Communications Manager 9.0 announced

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Cisco Unified Communications Manager 9.0 Announced

6th August 2012

Cisco Systems have announced and are shipping the latest version of their Unified Communications call processing platform Communications Manager. Version 9.0 features over a hundred new functions and features over the current shipping version 8.6.

For customers without an active software support subscription this will be a chargeable upgrade – and is priced at $9 per user when you buy 3 further years of software support up front. This is an increase over previous deals where upgrades were priced at $3 per user.

Key new features within CUCM 9.0 include:

Hunt Pilot Queueing
CUCM 9.0 provides basic call queueing for hunt groups where all agents are busy.
LDAP / Local user mix.
Introduces the ability to add local alongside LDAP users
codec Selection enhancements (e.g. g729 for voice, g711 for moh)
Allows more flexible codec selections for remote sites
Alpha URIs for dialling
Supports different formats for diallingn numbers for example calling “barry@intrinsic-comms.co.uk”
Native Call Recording interface (via 3rd party recorder)
More sopisticated in call recording options published to IP handsets (e.g. Pause / Resume)
New user pages
Redeveloped “ccumuser” web pages
Cross Cluster CAC
Provides the ability to support / enforce Call Admission Control (CAC) between CUCM clusters.
Enterprise License Manager
Probably the biggest new feature. CUCM 9.0 finally enforces the user based licensing model that Cisco have been pushing towards for years.
Some CUP server functionality folded into CUCM
Cisco have pushed some of the functionallity provided by the CUPS server into CUCM with a view to removing CUPS as a standalone product completely
Extend and connect
A new feature that allows enterprise telephony functions to be pushed to non IP endpoints. For example, extend and connect allows a remote user to use features such as hold, pickup etc on their mobile or home phone.

Enterprise License Manager (ELM) is big. This enforces CUCM user based licensing and completely removes the Device License Units (DLUs) that have been in place since CUCM licensing was introduced in version 5. This could cause lots and lots of issues within customers who have not been adhering to the “letter of the law” with relation to in particular Workspace Licensing and purchasing licenses for new users. This could result in some clusters being seriously under licensed when it comes to upgrade and requiring extremely expensive uplifts.

As an example of the latter:

  • Customer purchased 100 Workspace Professional licenses at version 8.0.
  • Cisco shipped 1,700 DLUs (each PRO license corresponds to 17 DLUs)
  • Customer then added 50 more users to the cluster without purchasing any more licenses as had plenty of DLUs left over from the ones originally purchased.
  • An upgrade to version 9.0 will cause 50 users to be unlicensed and will require additional user licenses to be purchased.

Cisco have been warning about this situation for a number of years – and it is finally coming. Going to version 9.0 could be an expensive process unless you have kept on top of your licensing…

Barry Hesk
Network Consulant
Intrinsic Network Solutions.