Collaboration and unified communications are important initiatives for enterprises to encourage productivity in today's challenging economic climate. However, few enterprises have the IT resources or expertise required to deploy, maintain, and support a full portfolio of collaboration applications. In order to gain the full benefit of collaboration, these enterprises are looking to source these applications from cloud collaboration service providers and gain efficiencies from the larger scale and deeper expertise that these providers are able to build across multiple customers. This situation has created a large revenue-generating opportunity for service providers and system integrators to deliver collaboration services in a hosted model to meet the needs of these enterprises.

Cisco HCS is a complete solution that includes the architectural blueprints, Cisco industry-leading applications, and management tools to automate the provisioning, assurance, and billing mediation for these applications. With HCS, part