Cisco vs. Microsoft: Customizing Your Cloud UC Deployment
The two major vendors in the unified communications space, Cisco and Microsoft, are both strongly promoting their cloud UC deployments. Microsoft announced that Teams, the Skype for Business replacement, will only be available in the Office 365 cloud, while Cisco has stated that Spark, hosted in Cisco’s own cloud, is its go-forward strategy.
If cloud UC is on your roadmap, but you don’t want to move to either the Microsoft cloud or the Cisco cloud, what then? What do you do if Teams or Spark don’t meet your needs, but the current UC products, Skype for Business and CUCM/Jabber, do? Does it really have to be one vendor or the other, or can it be both?