CXO INSIGHT

Tell me more about your Software-as-a-Service . What makes it unique ?

Cisco has been in the SaaS business since the Webex acquisition in 2007 . We have been enhancing our platform and services and added calling , messaging , events , Contact Centre and recently Communications Platform . Over the last few years , we built and continue to enhance a solid platform that cater for all these capabilities – the terminology that ' s used in the market is UCaaS , CCaaS , CPaaS – these are all part of the Cisco Webex portfolio .

The customer can choose any of those services from our partners , who are skilled and trained to deliver these capabilities . One partner can deliver integrated UCaaS with CCaaS and enhance with CPaaS . In the past , they were separate , less integrated and our customers had to deal with multiple vendors and system integrators . We ' re coming from the on-prem world and now moving

Wael Abdulal , Collaboration Sales Lead for Service Providers MEA , Cisco to the SaaS and the cloud world . While Cisco is still committed to the on-prem business , it is clear that the future is in the cloud , subscription and consumption based models . With a click of a mouse , you can subscribe to services and this is something very appealing for customers .

How will this service help hotels cut costs ?

In hotels , you ' ve got several systems that need to be implemented for the hotel to operate . You ' ve got telephony everywhere , wireless telephony for staff , telephony management system TMS , property management system PMS and other applications . Every time you build a hotel , you need to build all these services and this is costly and time-consuming .

Then you need to consider a refresh , you need to worry about integration . This is an operational nightmare for the hotelier but now they can simply subscribe for such services and pay for what they use – this is the power of SaaS .

We ' ve been working with lots of hotels around this to help them reduce their operational costs and to manage their total cost of ownership . A hotel chain with a good number of properties in a country have high operational cost . From IT and a communications perspective , we are able to make them look like one hotel because they can share resources , infrastructure , subscriptions and this consequently reduces overhead and operational cost .

" Our platform helps address this challenge as we provide the tools and communications infrastructure for hotels to share resources across the chain ."

The demand for hotels in the Middle East and North Africa is booming and it is only set to continue as demand from travellers increases . Hoteliers want to concentrate on providing the best stay possible and not have to worry about the technology behind operations . This is where Cisco steps in . EMW is working with Cisco to provide a Software-as-a- Service ( MEASAAS . com still under construction ), powered by Cisco ’ s Broadworks , hosted by EMW in the UAE for the first time . Wael Abdulal , Collaboration Sales Lead for Service Providers MEA , at Cisco explains how the SaaS helps hotels cut costs and solve challenges within hospitality .

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