Intrinsic Communications Connect

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.