Many companies were already adopting collaboration technologies before the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring. But the massive shift to a remote work model has created a sort of forced proof of concept for numerous businesses, with employees and managers learning on the fly how to use these tools to support productivity and collaboration.

One thing that many business and IT leaders have discovered: Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solutions and a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) are often a good fit. UCaaS refers to cloud-delivered capabilities, including voice and telephony, meeting solutions, messaging, presence and other communication applications. With SD-WAN, advanced software simplifies the operation of complex WANs while optimizing the end-user experience.

Here are several reasons why these two technologies work so well together.

Regardless of the vendor, when we discuss call routing in a telephony platform we’re almost always focused on the destination of the call. Similar to how the postal service operates, when the system is delivering the call or message, we are rarely focused on who the originator is. Keeping that in mind, it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a few scenarios where it may be beneficial to block specific numbers, or ranges of numbers from reaching your end users.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to implement a check on the calling party number (CPN) in a Cisco voice solution and keep those pesky spam calls at bay.

In order to illustrate the logic, let’s define some key components and run through a few examples.

If you have spent any time configuring Cisco voice gateways, you have likely struggled with dial-peer matching. Until recently, things were reasonably straightforward. Telephone directory numbers (extensions) were typically four digits. When a call came in from the outside, the carrier typically sent just the last four to seven digits. When you wanted to place…

The rapid pace of business change today doesn’t affect only product development and marketing – it also affects finance departments. Effective collaboration can be especially useful for finance departments that need to execute change quickly and effectively. CDW’s own finance department offers a great case in point. The department recently undertook an extensive re-engineering process…

Many people believe hosted voice and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) are the same thing. I suppose you could argue they’re similar, and certainly Hosted Voice is a component of UCaaS since you can’t have UCaaS without a dial tone. However, I think there are several differences. When considering moving away from an on-premises…

Over the last 13 years, I have seen countless advanced technologies in the telecom world. Networks have gone from ATM and Frame Relay to MPLS and VPLS and even Layer 2 through the years as users demands have evolved.