At the start of this year, Cisco introduced a new purchasing model that their customers could take advantage of called Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan Licensing. Flex Plan is a first-of-its-kind, single subscription model that allows you access to the fantastic collaboration software and services that Cisco has become so renowned for.

Simplify Purchasing

Purchasing software and licensing becomes a chore very quickly because it’s often a confusing task to know whether you’ve bought the right stuff. No longer do you have to need to have all sorts of different agreements for calling, meetings, and messaging. Cisco has simplified the entire process of building out your collaboration platform so you only pay one cost.

Enhanced Flexibility

Customers using this plan can mix and match between on-premises and cloud services based on your preferences and the structure of your network. The hybrid cloud nature of the platform means you don’t need a physical telephony system at each location to take advantage of the great list of services. Your users have the flexibility to be connected and use these services regardless of location.

Budgeting Advantages

Budgeting for the services and software you need when it comes to technology can be difficult as costs are often overlooked and can cause undesired surprises. With Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan, budgeting can be much more predictable because of the user-based opex model. This scales with your organisation and each year you have the option to adjust the model based on your next year’s growth forecast.

The flex plan features 3 options that suit businesses of all different sizes, nature and needs. To gain the most from your Flex Plan you should review what each subscription option has to offer and select the one that best describes what you need. All options include Cisco technical support.

This option allows you to provide calling, meeting and team collaboration services to specific individual, departments or teams. This is the option that best suits the smaller businesses who wish to benefit from Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan and know exactly the users who will be utilising the services. You are charged regardless of usage and users are not permitted to share their accounts. Ideal for organisations with defined power users.

The Active User option enables you to purchase meetings based on your business usage, with a minimum purchase of 40. Anyone in your organisation can host a meeting, but you only pay for those who use the Cisco services by initiating a Cisco Webex meeting or uses a knowledge worker’s designated personal conferencing number service. Full feature set for all, pay for maximum concurrent usage only.

This option is for any business who wants to enable Cisco collaboration to be used for every employee in their organisation. This is your maximum value option. For growing businesses, there is a built-in growth buffer that allows you to expand up to 120% of your provisioned size without additional cost. You total up the user count at the end of the year and there is no chargeback for the growth your business experiences. When you choose Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan Calling- Enterprise Agreement, you receive entitlements to a bundle of calling features including Communications Manager, Unity, Cisco Jabber, and many more. This enables you to simplify your VoIP infrastructure in the same manner as your cloud services.

Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan brings many advantages to businesses that are monetary, organisational, and technical, regardless of whether you are currently utilising Cisco technology or are looking to start. We highly recommend this plan to our customers as we have seen the benefits businesses have gained first hand.

At Tesrex we have an enormous amount of experience in all parts of Cisco Collaboration. We have helped many customers get set up with Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan licensing and take full advantage of everything it has to offer. If you are interested in how Flex Plan could benefit your business then please get in touch and we will arrange a consultation at a convenient time for you.