Notes: Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) Components

First in a likely series of UCCE posts coming from my first pass through the UCCE 9.x SRND, this post will focus on the various Cisco Unified Contact Enter Enterprise (UCCE) components.  The following is a mashup of information from the SRND to be used as a quick UCCE "cheat sheet".

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Components

The Unified CCE solution consists primarily of four Cisco software products:

• Unified Communications Infrastructure: Cisco Unified CM via JTAPI
• Queuing and Self-Service: Cisco Unified IP Interactive Voice Response (Unified IP IVR) or Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP).  
• The Unified IP IVR provides prompting, collecting, and queuing capability for the Unified CCE solution.  Unified IP IVR does not provide call control as Unified CVP does because it is behind Unified CM and under the control of the Unified CCE software by way of the Service Control Interface (SCI). When an agent becomes available, the Unified CCE software instructs the Unified IP IVR to transfer the call to the selected agent phone. The Unified IP IVR then requests Unified CM to transfer the call to the selected agent phone.
  
  Unified IP IVR is a software application that runs on Cisco MCS Servers. You can deploy multiple Unified IP IVR servers with a single Unified CM cluster under control of Unified CCE.
  
  Unified IP IVR has no physical telephony trunks or interfaces like a traditional IVR. The telephony trunks are terminated at the Voice Gateway. Unified CM provides the call processing and switching to set up a g.711 or G.729 Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) stream from the Voice Gateway to the Unified IP IVR. The Unified IP IVR communicates with Unified CM through the Java Telephony Application Programming Interface (JTAPI), and the Unified IP IVR communicates with Unified CCE through the Service Control Interface (SCI) with a VRU Peripheral Gateway or System Peripheral Gateway. 
• Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP) is a software application that runs on industry-standard servers such as Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS). It provides prompting, collecting, queuing, and call control services using standard web-based technologies. The Unified CVP architecture is distributed, fault tolerant, and highly scalable. With the Unified CVP system, voice is terminated on Cisco IOS gateways that interact with the Unified CVP application server using VoiceXML (speech) and H.323 or SIP (call control).
  
  The Unified CVP software is tightly integrated with the Cisco Unified CCE software for application control. It interacts with Unified CCE using the Voice Response Unit (VRU) Peripheral Gateway Interface. The Unified CCE scripting environment controls the execution of building-block functions such as play media, play data, menu, and collect information. The Unified CCE script can also invoke external VoiceXML applications to be executed by the Unified CVP VoiceXML Server, an Eclipse and J2EE-based scripting and web server environment. VoiceXML Server is well suited for sophisticated and high-volume IVR applications and it can interact with custom or third-party J2EE-based services. These applications can return results and control to the Unified CCE script when complete. Advanced load balancing across all Unified CVP solution components can be achieved by Cisco Content Services Switch (CSS) and Cisco IOS Gatekeepers or Cisco Unified Presence SIP Proxy Servers.

• Contact Center Routing and Agent Management: Unified CCE. The major components are CallRouter, Logger, Peripheral Gateway, and the Administration & Data Server/Administration Client.
• CallRouter: Makes all routing decisions on how to route a call or customer contact. Often just referred to as the “Router” in the context of Unified CCE components.
• Logger: The database server that stores contact center configuration data and temporarily stores historical reporting data for distribution to the data servers.
• CTI Object Server (CTI OS): CTI interface for Agent Desktops.
• Peripheral Gateway (PG): Interfaces to various peripheral devices, specifically to Unified CM, VRU (Unified IP IVR or Unified CVP), or Multichannel products (EIM and WIM for email and chat). The PG includes one or more Peripheral Interface Managers (PIMs) for the specific device interfaces.
• Agent PG: PG that has a Unified CM PIM.
• Unified CM Peripheral Interface Manager (PIM): Part of a PG that interfaces to a Unified CM cluster by using the JTAPI protocol.
• VRU PIM: Part of a PG that interfaces to the Unified IP IVR or Unified CVP through the Service Control Interface (SCI) protocol.
• MR PIM: Part of a PG that interfaces to call center Multimedia products, specifically EIM and WIM for email and chat.
• CTI Server: Part of the PG that interfaces to CTI OS and provides an open CTI interface, which is useful for some server-to-server communications.
• Network Interface Controller (NIC): Interfaces to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which enables Unified CCE to control how the PSTN routes a call.
• Administration & Data Server: Configuration interface and real-time and historical data storage (for example, for reporting). There are several different deployment models described later in this chapter.
• Administration Client: Configuration interface. This component has a subset of the functionality of the Administration & Data Server. It is a lighter weight deployment because it does not require a local database and it is deployed to allow more places from which to configure the solution.
• Cisco Unified Intelligence Center (Unified Intelligence Center): Provides web browser-based real-time and historical reporting. Unified Intelligence Center also works with other Cisco Unified Communications products.
• Agent Desktop Software: Cisco Agent Desktop, Cisco Toolkit Agent Desktop (CTI OS), Cisco Finesse, or integrations with third-party customer relationship management (CRM) software through Cisco Unified CRM Connector.