Most reading this blog post will be quite familiar with the workspace licensing program (CUWL) Cisco introduced a few years back for its collaborative technologies. For those who are not as familiar, the introduction of the CUWL offering marked a shift in Cisco’s licensing model from counting endpoint devices, server instances, and features to a model à la Microsoft where user counts are the key metric.

This shift dramatically simplified orderability for customers and opened doors for them to deploy new services and adopt new features. Now, just like any other licensing model, CUWL is not perfect and we continually voice areas that need further attention. One such area is within the presences and instant messaging arena.

Historically your options under CUWL entitlement were restricted to premise based deployment scenarios – either the Unified Presence Server and Client (CUPS/CUPC) or entitlement to voice enable a Microsoft Office Communicator or Lync client (CUCI-MOC or CUCI-LYNC). This is all in the face of many organizations opting for a hosted solution or enterprise IM as opposed to on premise servers. WebEx Connect often chosen in a foray into hosted presence while also being owned by Cisco, it only seemed logical that Cisco create a path for WebEx Connect entitlement to make its way under the CUWL program.

Well, I’m happy to announce that as of October 17, 2011, WebEx Connect Cloud IM service is available to all new CUWL clients under both the standard and professional editions. Now the obvious next question is “what about existing clients?” – and unfortunately the details of how Cisco is going to handle that are still unclear. I’ll be sure to post commentary on that communication as soon as I receive it.

Some other notable changes to the CUWL program are:

• Addition of 1:10 WebEx Meeting Center cloud port per CUWL Pro user
• Option of adding named host licensing for WebEx Meeting Center
• Addition to client choices including Jabber for Mac, iPhone, and Nokia