While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. Earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential CDW coworkers to start working remotely.

Over the course of a weekend, our Information Technology teams gained firsthand knowledge of what our customers were either already going through or soon going to be. It was a tall order to tackle the enterprise networking, storage, security, collaboration and communication needs to allow 7,100 coworkers to work from home, but our teams rose to the task. Now, we’re sharing our experience with our customers.

Across industries, IT networks are becoming more complex. The number of users, the number of devices and the amount of bandwidth being consumed are all growing at exponential rates. But resources dedicated to the network largely remain flat. At some point, something has to give.

The only way to battle complexity is with the simplicity offered by features such as automation and orchestration. This is where software-defined approaches to networking come in. Particularly, the software-defined access approach pioneered by Cisco Systems (SD-Access, or SDA) can simplify network deployment and management, freeing up more time for IT departments to focus on strategic projects.

We at CDW pride ourselves on developing automation tools to make our collaboration deployment engineers’ jobs easier. We have created tools to automate just about everything there is to automate with Cisco on-premises products: Communications Manager, Unity Connections, Contact Center Express/Enterprise and Voice Gateways, to name a few. With the migration to more cloud-based solutions in the collaboration space, and coinciding with our new service of deploying the cloud voice platform RingCentral, it made sense to create an automation tool to quickly provision users and phones.

Cisco has been hard at work to deliver features and enhancements to the Webex Calling product portfolio. Here are the biggest announcements from Cisco’s recent Connect Cloud Calling Summit that make Webex Calling a more complete communications service in the cloud.

The last time we blogged about this topic, we went into detail about that “one weird trick” for bringing Telepresence into your Webex Event Center meetings and events. While effective, that “trick” involved a complex setup to get there. Fun for geeking out — not as much fun when trying to simplify your virtual event workflow. Event Center now supports joining directly via Cisco Video devices.

With demand for businesses to consume collaboration services in the cloud at an all-time high right now, CDW has added the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) solution to its Managed Collaboration Anywhere (MCA) portfolio. This portfolio now includes managed collaboration solutions covering the complete Cisco Hosted and Cloud Calling portfolio of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), Cisco UCM Cloud and Cisco Webex Calling. Cisco is currently providing collaboration solutions that deliver enterprise-grade service to more than 100 million devices.