1. Competitive Battle Card: Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS)
A quick reference guide to help you sell against the Cisco HCS CC
Cisco HCS CC – Solution Overview
Cisco HCS CC – Strength & Weaknesses
Hq’d in San Jose, California
Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) is a UC and CC platform for SPs who want to offer Cisco collaboration technologies through their own cloud.
The only competitor in the marketplace with a UC + CC + TC offering, along with BroadSoft.
Part of a comprehensive product portfolio
HCS is a multi-instance, virtualized deployment of Cisco’s on-premise CC solution
Has a Packaged Contact Center Enterprise(Packaged CCE) to simplify the management interfaces and reduce installation times.
No perpetual licensing. 3-year CUWL + SW and Smartnet maintenance required.
Strengths:
Part of a comprehensive end-to-end portfolio to meet a variety of needs
Very strong branding in CC space
Very well-represented in U.S. and EMEA channels. 29 HCS-CC providers WW
One of the few companies to provide a cloud migration strategy
Weaknesses :
Drives customers into all-Cisco environment
Expensive pricing. Prohibitive at <250 seats. Not-competitive
FUD on Spark CC
Does not have dynamic routing capabilities – vs. what Cisco tells…
Limited analytics and reporting capabilities
Non-native Salesforce integration
Positioning & Objection handling against Cisco HCS and UCM:
Closed Ecosystem
Capabilities
FUD on Spark CC
Pricing & Licensing
Issue 1: Cisco products drives customers into all-Cisco environments while industry is moving toward a multi-vendor strategy.
Impact 1: SPs cannot bundle with third-party vendor products/services for additional value
Issue 2: Non-customizable products
Impact 2: Customers cannot customize products and resolve IOT issues, creating heavy dependency on Cisco’s new releases.
BroadSoft Advantage 2: BroadSoft has an open platform, promoting multi-vendor strategies and providing APIs for customization of products
Issue: Cisco only has static routing capabilities.
Issue 2: Limited analytics and reporting capabilities.
Issue 3: Non-native SFDC integration
Impact: Customers are limited in their abilities to improve business outcomes, profitability and have a better grasp of their business processes. Visualizing and reporting also very effort-intensive.
BroadSoft advantage: BroadSoft CC-One has predictive and dynamic routing capabilities, coupled with state-of-the-art analytics and reporting to optimize business outcomes.
Issue: Cisco is heavily investing in their Spark Cloud CC offering. They will be looking to convert their base over to its own Cloud.
Impact : Who gets the priority in innovation? Who wins the internal political race? When is HCS getting EOL’d? With Cisco lock-ins and 3 year commitment requirements, Cisco customers’ future are too ambiguous.
BroadSoft Advantage: BroadSoft has a powerful end-to-end, complete, modularized platform. CC-One will maintain industry leadership.
Issue: Complex and expensive licensing structure. No perpetual licensing model. 3-year CUWL + SW and Smartnet maintenance required.
Impact: Prohibitive at <250 seats. Not-competitive at mid segment ( ) and still very expensive for larger deployments. 3-year customer agreements lock customers into those very high pricing environments, preventing immediate churn