Wholesale Route-to-Market Solution Guide

The Wholesale Route-to-Market (RTM) is a strategic channel solution designed to bring Webex to the SMB segment by leveraging the market power of Service Providers around the world. It is backed by Cisco's innovative technology and deep collaboration expertise. It is comprised of a new operations model, new commercials and new partner programs.

The Wholesale platform delivers operations APIs and Partner Portal innovations that make high-volume, high-velocity transactions possible, while making it easy for partners to create differentiated, cobranded offers in market with their own products.

The new Wholesale commercial strategy facilitates the 35M BroadWorks users to move to the Webex cloud with predictable, fixed, per-user per-month packaging and monthly billing in arrears. A single commercial relationship with each Service Provider is the anchor for all of their end customers, greatly simplifying workflows.

The Wholesale partner programs address both the Service Provder technical and business goals. Cisco's Managed Onboarding Program is designed with two parallel work-streams: Technical Onboarding and Go-to-Market. Dedicated Cisco experts, paired with comprehensive online partner trainings and a robust set of migration and marketing toolkits assure the onboarding experience exceeds expectations.

The Wholesale offer is Webex and comes in 4 packages: Common Area Calling, Webex Calling, Webex Suite and Webex Meetings.

The Wholesale Route to Market (RTM) solution is optimized to provide managed service providers with a high-velocity, transactional sales motion. It provides:

• Fixed, predictable transfer price

• Simplified packaging

• High-velocity provisioning UX and APIs

• Monthly invoicing based on net active users

• Simplified self-administration interface

The Wholesale RTM offer integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows. This allows you to manage the sales cycle end-to-end without having to register every customer with the Cisco Commerce Workplace (CCW).

Wholesale RTM provides the following enhancements over Webex Calling to better integrate with your SMB sales motion:

• With Wholesale RTM, there's a fixed transfer price with Cisco for each package. These transfer prices are captured in a PO that gets submitted once into CCW. After that partners no longer need to use CCW for any sales transaction.

• All Wholesale RTM sales will be based on the same fixed, predictable transfer price. This greatly simplifies and accelerates the sales process.

• Wholesale RTM provides you with two simple interfaces to provision and manage customers:

  • Partner Hub provides a simple UX for you to provision, manage, and remove customers and users.

  • Control Hub is Cisco’s web-based enterprise management portal, offering a holistic view of an enterprise’s Webex services.

• Wholesale RTM APIs provide a simple, machine to machine interface that integrates into the service provider back-office systems. This allows you to provision, manage, and remove customers and users.

• Wholesale RTM bills you monthly for the net number of active licenses, in arrears, and pro-rated on the activation dates of each customer. This allows Service Provider partners to flex up and down and only get charged for licenses that are actively provisioned on the system.

• Wholesale RTM uses a simple packaging that is well-suited for the small and medium business segment.

The Wholesale RTM solution offers four calling and collaboration packages for your end users.

• Common Area—The Common Area package supports basic calling features. It is intended for simple endpoints like hallway phones, door phones, and simple retail stations. The Common Area package includes features like Call Forward, BLF, Transfer, Call Waiting, and T.38 Fax. More advanced calling features, as well as Webex Clients, Messaging, and Meetings are part of higher value packages.

• Enhanced Calling—This calling-only package includes a subset of the calling features that are associated with Webex Calling with the option of the Webex App softphone or a choice of devices. It does not include the Meetings and Messaging functionality and offers a calling focused package for customers looking for a simple voice solution.

• Webex Calling—The Webex Calling package includes advanced calling features, as well as the Webex Client, Webex Messaging, and a "basic" meetings capability. This package is intended for all professional users of the platform. In addition to the features in Common Area, calling features include, but are not limited to, Hunting, Voicemail, Visual Voicemail, Shared Call Appearance, Privacy, N-way Calling, Executive/executive assistant, and many more. Webex Calling also includes use of all the Webex Clients for Desktop and Mobile OSes, Webex Messaging functions including Spaces and File Sharing.

• Webex Suite—Webex Suite is the most feature rich package that includes all capabilities of the Webex Calling package, all user and groups services, Webex messaging, and the full Webex Meetings product for up to 1000 participants. This package will appeal to the senior/professional level within the company with heavy calling and large meeting requirements.

• Customer Experience Essentials—Wholesale Customer Experience Essentials provides the fundamental capabilities of the Webex Contact Center solution. It includes all the Webex Calling professional capabilities, Customer Experience Basic features, and some additional key features accessible through the Webex App for both agents and supervisors. The features like screen pop, supervisor experience in Webex App, and real-time and historical agent and queue view make the Customer Experience Essentials distinct from the Customer Experience Basic.

  For more information, see: Webex Customer Experience Essentials

• Webex Meetings—The Webex Meetings package is a standalone meetings package that includes Webex Messaging, and Webex Meetings for up to 1000 participants. This package does not include a calling seat. It is intended for those users who only want a meetings and messaging capability that is not associated with their calling behavior.

Unlike the Webex Calling Flex offer, with the Wholesale RTM solution, Cisco does not impose any specific pricing and terms on the end-customers, these are up to each service provider to implement as they see fit based on their own business model.

Webex Calling has the enterprise business calling features that Service Providers need – all included in the single user license charge.

The Webex App is our single end user experience that delivers calling, meetings, and messaging to the end user. With Webex Calling and the Webex App together you can:

• Make, receive, or decline calls on your desk phone or with the Webex App on your smartphone, PC, laptop, or tablet.

• Pair with Webex devices using Cisco Intelligent Proximity and/or desk phone control to access common contacts and call history on the app while using those devices for your audio and video.

• Elevate any call into a full-featured meeting to take advantage of screen sharing, whiteboarding, AI transcriptions, real-time transcriptions, notes and action items, recordings, and more

The Webex App provides team collaboration features that meet the day-to-day enterprise meeting and collaboration needs including:

• 1:1 and group messaging—Chat individually or in groups with messages, gifs, emojis, and animated reactions. Easily delete or edit messages, start a conversation thread, add people to conversations, see read receipts, and more.

• File and content sharing—Share even the largest of files in a secure space that’s neatly organized, searchable, and saved right alongside your chats so it is easy to find what you need.

• Two-way whiteboarding—Whiteboard or draw with your team and share the interactive drawing in a chat. Keep iterating whether or not you’re in a live meeting.

• Make calls directly to other Webex users—Make or receive video calls to other Webex App users through the app, for free.

• Work with the tools you love—Forget app-switching and interrupted workflows. Integrate Webex with the tools you use every day for your most productive work. You can incorporate key and deep integration with the likes of Microsoft, Google, ServiceNow, and more.

• Personalize your spaces—Change your color theme, add a cover photo, set a custom status, and personalize the experience to you.

• Read about more features in the Webex App solutions overview.

Better together experiences and pricing are available with the Webex Suite when buying Webex with Calling, Meetings, Messaging, Polling, and Events in a single offer. Webex Meetings is optimized for larger scale meetings that demand various access methods and features for both participants and presenters. Webex Meetings is the world’s most popular video conferencing service for the enterprise, offering highly secure integrated audio, video, and content sharing from the Webex cloud.

The Webex Meetings suite is a feature-rich solution that includes modules for collaborative meetings, training, large events, and remote support. Webex Meetings supports multiple mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Android and Android wearables. You can meet with anyone on all common OS platforms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Webex Meetings supports Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Edge browsers.

• Webex Meetings supports HD (720p) video and is interoperable with Cisco Webex Rooms and third-party standards-based video systems. You can invite others to join meetings from mobile devices or their own video systems, such as desk and room devices. This video capability combines video bridging and web conferencing into one always-on meeting. Schedule ahead or meet instantly—everyone is welcome.

• Customers can gain a strong competitive advantage using Webex Meetings, which offers:

  • Robust video—Multi-stream HD video that is customizable to how you want to work and who you want to see in the meeting, even on mobile devices. Add Cisco award-winning video room and desk devices to your Webex meeting for life-like experiences.

  • Powerful mobile experience—Optimized just for mobile users with customizable 720p video views, native screen sharing, hands-free joining, simple meeting scheduling, and it adapts to noisy environments.

  • Join from your device of choice from the pocket to the boardroom—Phone, browser, mobile, room device, third-party standards-based room devices, and even Skype for Business. And you’ll have a consistent meeting experience no matter how you join.

  • Integrated into how you work and learn—Schedule, join and start meetings with the third-party tools you may already use, including Microsoft Teams, Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Microsoft Office 365, Google Calendar, and Skype for Business. Webex Meetings is also tightly integrated with popular Learning Management Systems (LMS), so remote learning can be as effective as it is in class.

  • One meeting experience—Whether participants are together or apart, internal or external to the organization, they will have one meeting experience across mobile or video devices.

  • Professional and effective meetings—Keep internal and external participants engaged with integrated audio, video, and content sharing capabilities, made possible by global online conferencing with Webex Meetings applications. You can also share other applications, desktops, and even video files for more productive and impactful collaborative meetings, training, and events.

  • Virtual meetings as if you were face to face—Start or join a meeting using a web browser, mobile phone, desktop, or in-room video device. Make online meetings even more engaging just like you were together in person with video that automatically switches to display the person who is speaking, creating an intuitive meeting experience. Bring everyone together in a personalized, always-available meeting room anytime. You can use your own standards-based video device, which can scale your meeting from a few to hundreds, as desired.

  • Enhanced security and compliance—Take the worry out of your meeting with multi-layer security built with Cisco expertise that does not compromise user experience.

  • Global meeting architecture—Cisco Webex® has a global architecture and network, purpose built for meetings, to ensure speed and performance. With data centers located throughout the world, people join using the Webex data center closest to them. The benefit? High-quality video meetings without delays—no matter where participants are located. This is made possible by an enterprise structure that securely and reliably delivers SaaS functionality.

  • Improved administration—To better manage the collaboration portfolio, the Cisco Webex Control Hub allows administrative users to access Webex Meetings settings and reports in a single pane of glass.

  • Improved speed of deployment—Experience rapid time to value with low total cost of ownership by being able to quickly deploy the solution over the secure Webex platform. You can deploy Webex Meetings quickly instead of over months, taking full advantage of innovative video and web collaboration best practices along with Cisco technology and expertise.

Webex Meetings helps you forget about the technology, so you can focus on having a well-planned event and productive meeting. Joining Webex Meetings is a breeze for everyone, no matter whether they connect from an app on their computer, smartphone, or tablet or join with a group of colleagues using a Webex Room Series device.

Webex Assistant for Meetings is an intelligent, interactive virtual meeting assistant that makes meetings searchable, actionable, and more productive. You can ask Webex Assistant to follow up on action items, take note of important decisions, and highlight key moments during a meeting or event.

Webex Assistant for Meetings is available for free for Webex Meetings, Webex Suite package meeting sites and Personal Meeting Rooms. Support includes both new and existing sites.

Enable Webex Assistant Meetings for Webex Meetings and Webex Suite Packages

Webex Assistant is by default enabled for Webex Meetings and Webex Suite package Wholesale customers. Partner Administrators and Customer Organization Administrators can disable the feature for Customer Organizations through Control Hub.

Limitations

The following limitations exist for Webex for Cisco Wholesale:

• Support is limited to Webex Meetings and Webex Suite package meeting sites and Personal Meeting Rooms only.

• Closed captioning transcriptions are supported in English, Spanish, French and German only.

• Content sharing via email can be accessed only by users within your organization.

• Meeting content is not accessible to users outside your organization. Meeting content is also not accessible when shared between users of different packages from within the same organization.

• With the Webex Meetings and Webex Suite package, meeting recording transcriptions are available whether Webex Assistant is enabled or disabled. However, if local recording is selected, post-meeting transcripts or highlights are not captured.

Additional Information About Webex Assistant For user information on how to use the feature, see Use Webex Assistant in Webex Meetings and Webex Webinars.

Call Queue Creation:

The key distinction from the creation of the Customer Experience Call Queue mentioned in Webex Customer Experience Essentials is that, for Wholesale organizations, On the Select Agents page, a user can be selected as an agent only if they have the CX Essentials package assigned. Show Customer Experience Users Only toggle won't be available.

Call Queue Upgrade:

If the organization has purchased Customer Experience Essentials and wants to move the existing basic call queue to Customer Experience Essentials queue, you can do it effortlessly from the Control Hub. Upgrading the queue maintains the assigned agents and supervisors, and the existing settings of the queue.

Limitations/Warning:

• Once a call queue is upgraded, you can’t downgrade it.
• Virtual line and workspace in the Customer Experience Basic call queue aren’t supported to upgrade to Customer Experience Essentials queues.

To upgrade a call queue:

1. Sign in to Control Hub, and go to Services > Calling > Features > Call Queue.
2. Click the ellipsis ... icon of the call queue that you want to upgrade and click Upgrade queue.
3. Review the queue information and click Next.

   The weighted routing pattern from Customer Experience Basic isn’t supported in Customer Experience Essentials and defaults to Top Down. You can change to other routing types after the upgrade.

4. In Review Package Assignment screen, we can do either two actions mentioned below:
   1. Remove agents who do not have the Customer Experience package by clicking 'Continue the upgrade without the listed agents'. This action will remove those agents from the call queue.
   2. Change the package assigned to the relevant users by navigating to the 'Assigned User Package' page as shown below. This will take you to the users screen where you can assign the customer experience essentials package as needed. Thereafter, you can re-attempt the Call Queue Upgrade.

The Wholesale RTM solution provides you with two simple interfaces to provision and manage customers:

• Partner Hub

• Control Hub

Partner Hub: Managing the Offer

Partner Hub is Cisco's web-based portal for management of the Wholesale RTM solution. Partner Hub is the administrative interface that you use to configure offer attributes that span enterprises. Partner Hub provides:

• Offer Management—Establish default settings, templates, and policies that apply to all enterprises managed under the offer.

• Cobranding—Set client brand colors, logos, and other client attributes for a cobranded end-user experience that reenforces the values of both the Service Provider and Cisco.

• Enterprise Onboarding—Add new businesses to your offer, assign enterprise-level features, and security compliance. Set meeting site attributes including dial-in and callback services.

• Enterprise Management and Reporting—Assign roles and responsibilities to admins within the enterprises that you manage. See analytics across all enterprises to monitor adoption, usage, and quality metrics.

Partner Hub has multiple levels of role-based access control letting Service Providers assign access levels, while maintaining security best practices.

Control Hub: Managing on Behalf of the Enterprise

Webex Control Hub is Cisco’s web-based enterprise management portal. It offers a holistic view of an enterprise’s Webex services. It helps you manage all enterprises, users, devices, and security settings in one place. In the context of the Wholesale RTM solution, the primary user of Control Hub is the service provider administrator who updates settings on behalf of the end enterprise. It is also possible for the enterprise administrator to perform these functions. This provides the ability for Service Providers to allow your enterprises to self-manage, if desired. There are multiple roles that Service Providers can assign to their customer to allow them to have different levels of access to Control Hub. This increases offer flexibility and customization.

Control Hub provides one central cloud app for all your administrative functions with detailed analytics and reporting. Also, the administrator can configure security and compliance policies to help keep data safe and meet regulatory needs.

Control Hub provides:

• User creation and service assignment—Manage all moves, adds, changes, and deletes (MACDs) for users in an enterprise. Control Hub allows you to set specific package types per user such entitling them to a Common Area or Suite package.

• Actionable insights—See adoption in action across all enterprises, and within enterprises. Understand how users are calling, messaging, joining meetings, how long meetings last, and who is using video. This helps you to measure the adoption and use the services for the entire offer.

• Drill down on the root cause of user experience issues—At the enterprise level, identify issues such as voice quality and page-load performance so you can troubleshoot them before they have an impact.

• Flexible policy definition—Easily configure service settings for administrators and users with role templates and granular policy controls.

• User and device management—Activate devices quickly, manage users, and enable synchronization with Microsoft Active Directory and integrated single sign-on for all, or a subset of the enterprises you manage.

See Control Hub Management and Analytics Data Sheet for more about Control Hub management and analytics.

The Wholesale RTM solution is built for service provider scale. To achieve this, all functions for partner level and enterprise (Control Hub) level management are enabled via APIs.

The Wholesale RTM solution includes specifically built APIs for service providers that help onboarding customers and users at scale. In an ideal state, an API call for creating a customer entity in Webex and an API call for creating and configuring services for users are all you need. Cisco has invested in asynchronous APIs that do away with ordering APIs and any other manual operations. These APIs extend those available on developer.webex.com and allow service providers to span integration from service provider to customer to user easily. The design guidelines for these APIs are that they are simple to use, allow service providers to operate at scale, and offer flexibility via onboarding templates to target offers to the end customers.

The diagram below illustrates the overall Architecture for the Wholesale Route to Market solution. There are two areas highlighted:

• Customer Provisioning/Management

• Service Provider Billing

These areas are discussed in more detail in subsequent topics.

Wholesale RTM service provider partners would likely have a reseller channel. These reseller channels typically include agreements with one or many resellers (for this feature, we call the reseller a ‘SubPartner’). These SubPartners typically extend the offer to their customer base and manage the customer lifecycle which is critical to success. At its core, the feature allows a partner to abstract billing integration with Cisco from its SubPartners.

For more information, see Set up SubPartner section under Deploy Wholesale Route to Market.

Once set up, to successfully onboard customers, the SubPartner must use their access to Partner Hub to configure calling integration and Wholesale RTM onboarding templates (the parent partner's shared subscription ID will automatically appear during template creation). Once the templates are in place, the SubPartner may use the customer creation wizards in Partner Hub or the APIs to onboard customers. To provide some insight, Webex architecture models SubPartners as a partner, which allows SubPartners to benefit from capabilities similar to a partner. SubPartners can have their admin users, reporting, branding, and onboarding templates and fully manage their customers.

Currently, this model supports only 1 level (Partner - zero or more SubPartners), and there isn't a hard limit on the number of SubPartners per partner. A SubPartner does NOT have access to the parent partners instance and other SubPartners that may exist under the parent partner, and a SubPartner will be able to manage only customers they onboard. A partner can create, view, and delete billing reports for their individual SubPartners. For more information, see Billing Reconciliation on enhancements to the report related to Sub Partners.

SubPartner (also known as indirect providers in the UI)

The SubPartner model enhancements in this phase enables parent partners to manage indirect providers and their customers with improved visibility and actions via Partner Hub and APIs.

The Parent partners will establish a managed-by relationship with both the indirect provider and their customers, improving visibility and control within the SubPartner model.

The managed-by relationship between the Parent partner and the SubPartner is established during the setup phase of the SubPartner.

Meanwhile, the managed-by relationship between the Parent partner and the sub-partner's customer is established during Wholesale customer creation or Wholesale organization attach.

Additionally, besides empowering SubPartners to independently carry out operations, this feature enables Parent partners to oversee both SubPartners and their respective customers through both the UI and APIs.

Wholesale Provisioning API Changes

The Wholesale API offers an extra support parameter 'onBehalfOfSubPartnerOrgId' on behalf of the partner, allowing the Parent partner to execute wholesale operations for the SubPartners.

• Wholesale Provisioning API v1

Partner Hub

Parent Partner - Indirect Provider view

If you are signed in to Partner Hub as a Parent Partner Admin holding both the 'partner full admin' and 'wholesale admin' roles, you'll have access to the 'Indirect providers' tab. This section displays all indirect providers linked to your partner organization through a 'managed-by' relationship. On the right-hand side, you'll find the cross-launch button. Clicking on it will direct you to the Partner Hub account of the indirect provider, where you will be logged in as the Parent Partner admin user.

Parent Partner - Customer List view

When logged in to Partner Hub as a Parent Partner Admin with both the 'partner full admin' role and the 'wholesale admin' role, you will have access to the Parent Partner's customer list. However, as part of the SubPartner feature, you can now explicitly search for customers belonging to the Parent Partner's Indirect Providers. These customers will not be loaded in the customer list by default, but by explicitly searching for them, the Parent Partner admin can view them. Additionally, the Parent Partner admin will have the ability to cross-launch from here into the customers Control Hub of the Indirect Providers.

Limitation

• The cross-launch of the Helpdesk is not operational for the SubPartners.
• The UI for the Partner Hub indirect provider list currently only accommodates 100 indirect providers.
• When cross-launched into the SubPartner Partner Hub, the following functionalities will be unavailable:

  • Analytics Screen

  • Services Screen

  • Reports Screen

  • Webex Release Management

  • Flex Trial Creation

List Wholesale SubPartners

Use this API to obtain a list of SubPartners for the partner organization. You can list all SubPartners, or limit the list to those SubPartners that meet the specified parameters such as provisioning state (suspended, active).

1. Go to the List Wholesale SubPartners API.

2. Under Query Parameters, enter any search parameters that you want to use (for example, the provisioningState, offset, max). For additional details on these parameters, see the Developer help on the API.

3. Click Run.

   The API outputs the list of SubPartners along with the unique orgId and provisioningState.

For information on the supported features for the Wholesale Route-to-Market solution, see Webex Wholesale RTM feature matrix.