Extend the value of your on-premises unified communications and collaboration investment with Cisco Spark Hybrid Services. They make it easy for you to connect your existing network resources and on-premises unified communications services to the Cisco Spark platform in the cloud. This provides even greater collaboration capabilities, along with consistent, unified end-user and administrator experiences.
More and more, organizations are choosing collaboration services from the cloud. Why? Cloud services:
Many organizations, however, are unable or unwilling to move all their services to the cloud. Often, they are not ready to replace everything they have on-premises, or they simply want to augment their current collaboration tools with those from the cloud. But having tools from both the cloud and the premises can create inconsistent, disjointed user experiences and tools that don't work together as one.
Cisco solves this problem with Cisco Spark Hybrid Services. These services connect what you have on-premises with Cisco Spark in the cloud to provide a single integrated experience. If you like the capabilities of Cisco Spark, you can integrate those capabilities with what you currently deploy for an even better end-user and administrator experience.
Get the capabilities of Cisco Spark even if you already have or would prefer to use Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Business Edition 6000 or 7000, or Hosted Collaboration Solution for call control. With Hybrid Call Service, organizations can use the Cisco call control you have, and integrate it so tightly with Spark message and meetings, your end users will never know they are not a single service.
Integrate your Microsoft Exchange with Cisco Spark message and meeting capabilities. Hybrid Calendar Service makes it easier to schedule meetings, especially from a mobile device, by automatically creating a Cisco Spark room.
Simplify the administrative experience by automatically synchronizing Microsoft Active Directory users with Cisco Spark user management (creating, updating, deleting), so that users are always current in Cisco Spark.
Enjoy industry-leading media experiences by providing a local instance of the media processing for lower latency and Internet bandwidth savings.
The Cisco Hybrid Media node is software that is installed on a Cisco UCS server that registers and is managed by the Cisco Collaboration Cloud Management portal. It facilitates the routing of Cisco Spark meetings to the local, on-net Hybrid Media node to join the participants together in a meeting. The Media Services choose the most efficient way to use the available resources, creating a better experience for users.
End users and IT administrators get the best of cloud and premises. Hybrid Services combine the cloud and the premises for an integrated experience. Examples include the ability to instantly share your desktop, automatic directory synchronization, and simplified meeting scheduling from mobile devices.
Hybrid Services help your organization take advantage of Cisco cloud services without discarding your existing investments. Instead, you can integrate them deeply together for better user experience, and move to cloud services as and when you like.
Security is integral to Cisco Spark and its hybrid services. Cisco has used its extensive experience gained from securing the world's largest networks. Combining this knowledge with the hardware and the software elements of our market-leading communications and cloud services, we've built the Cisco Spark Service and its hybrid capabilities.
Each of these services can be deployed together or individually. To facilitate the Hybrid Services, a software application or connector must be deployed and run on your premises (or in the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution partner cloud). The Hybrid Call Service and the Hybrid Calendar Service connectors require Cisco Expressway, while the Hybrid Directory Service connector runs standalone on a windows-based server.
With Cisco Spark Hybrid Media Services, you can dynamically overflow and mix the media. That makes it easier for you to find the optimal mix of on-premises and cloud resources to:
There are no incremental subscriptions or fees for deploying Cisco Spark Hybrid Services. The Hybrid Service Connectors and Cisco Expressway are downloadable free of charge. They are part of Cisco Unified Communications licensing schemes and the Cisco Spark service.
