What did Upstream Works and Raya Information Technology announce on November 5, 2026?
Upstream Works and Raya Information Technology (Raya IT), Cisco’s Africa Partner of the Year 2025, announced a strategic partnership that makes Raya IT the Upstream Works Cisco specialist partner for the Middle East and Africa. Raya IT will sell, deliver and support Totalix™ for Cisco from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the GCC, starting with banks and financial institutions that keep customer data on-premise under Central Bank of Egypt and SAMA rules.
WOODBRIDGE, Ontario and CAIRO, Egypt, November 5, 2026 — Upstream Works, the contact center and customer experience (CX) software company with 25 years in CX, today announced a strategic partnership with Raya Information Technology (Raya IT), one of the most decorated Cisco partners in the Middle East and Africa. Raya IT becomes the Upstream Works Cisco specialist partner for the region, selling, delivering and supporting Totalix™ for Cisco for banks, financial institutions, telecom operators, government entities and enterprises from its offices in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the GCC.
The agreement cements the strategic work the two companies have already done together with Cisco customers in the region, and turns it into a single, specialist route to market across the Middle East and Africa: one team that knows the customer’s Cisco estate, its regulators and its languages, backed by the Upstream Works product, engineering and support teams.
Founded in 1998, Raya IT has helped more than 1,000 customers adopt new technology across financial services, telecommunications, the public sector, oil and gas, hospitality and retail. Its record with Cisco is among the strongest in the region: Cisco Africa Partner of the Year 2025, Cisco Enterprise Partner of the Year in the Middle East and Africa in 2024 and 2023, and Cisco North Africa and Levant Partner of the Year 2024. Raya IT also runs Cisco Powered managed services and its own data center business, giving customers one partner for the network, the data center and now the contact center desktop.
Financial services is where the partnership starts. Many of the region’s banks run their contact centers on Cisco UCCE and PCCE with the Finesse agent desktop, and they answer to regulators who expect customer data to stay close to home. In Egypt, Banking Law No. 194 of 2020 makes customer data and accounts confidential (Article 140) and binds everyone who sees that data at work to keep it confidential (Article 142). Providers that handle bank customer data must be registered with the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), and the CBE’s instructions on protecting bank customers’ rights require complaints to be answered within 15 days. In Saudi Arabia, section 3.4.3 of the SAMA Cyber Security Framework requires SAMA’s approval before a bank uses public or hybrid cloud and says that, in principle, only cloud services located in the Kingdom should be used; material outsourcing needs SAMA’s no objection, SAMACares service levels set five working days to answer a customer complaint, and the Personal Data Protection Law has been enforceable since September 14, 2024.
Totalix for Cisco is built for exactly that situation. It is native to Cisco Finesse on UCCE, PCCE and WCCE, and to Webex Contact Center, so banks keep Finesse, their Cisco routing, business rules and integrations exactly as they are. Agents gain chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp and messaging, AgentNow live video, UW Knowledge & Assist and AI Agent Assist in one timeline beside their Cisco calls, so a complaint that arrives by phone, email and chat is seen and answered as one case, inside the regulator’s window. It runs where the bank needs it to run: on-premise in the bank’s own data center, alongside the Cisco estate, or as a dedicated single-tenant instance placed to keep data in-country. UWXP, the Upstream Works AI layer, can run on-premise too and never trains on the bank’s data. Arabic is one of the 37+ languages that ship, with full right-to-left layouts and real-time translation of Arabic voice as well as text.
The timing matters. Cisco UCCE, PCCE and UCCX versions 12.5 and 12.6 reach their last date of support on December 31, 2027. Totalix for Cisco lets banks modernize the agent side now, with every digital channel, video and AI, and make their platform decision on their own timetable rather than Cisco’s.
“Raya IT is one of the most respected Cisco partners anywhere, and in the Middle East and Africa they set the standard,” said Jeff Palmer, Chief Revenue Officer at Upstream Works. “This partnership cements a lot of strategic work our teams have already done together, and it makes Raya our Cisco specialist for the whole region. Banks here have invested heavily in Cisco, and they answer to regulators like the Central Bank of Egypt and SAMA who expect customer data to stay at home. Together we can give them every digital channel, live video, knowledge and AI inside the Finesse desktop their agents already know, on-premise in their own data centers, without ripping anything out. For financial services across the Middle East and Africa, this is where Totalix for Cisco really comes into its own, and there is no better partner to take it there than Raya.”
Beyond banking, the partnership covers every sector Raya IT serves, including telecom operators modernizing large Cisco contact centers, and government entities that must keep citizen data in the country. Raya IT also delivers the wider Upstream Works family: UWXP, UW Knowledge & Assist, UW Insights and AgentNow.
Totalix for Cisco is available through Raya IT across Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the GCC, and through the Upstream Works partner network of more than 50 partners worldwide. Upstream Works is at Cairo ICT 2026, at the Egypt International Exhibition Center in New Cairo from November 7 to 10, showing Totalix for Cisco; meetings can be booked at upstreamworks.com/resources/events/cairo-ict-2026/. Organizations can request a demo through Raya IT or at upstreamworks.com/demo/.
About Raya Information Technology: Raya Information Technology is a leading systems integrator in the Middle East and Africa, established in 1998, with regional offices in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the GCC. It has helped more than 1,000 customers across financial services, telecommunications, the public sector, oil and gas, hospitality, commercial and retail adopt new technologies and reach higher levels of business performance, across data center, networking, security, digital workplace, collaboration, software and managed services. Learn more at raya-it.net.
About Upstream Works
Upstream Works makes contact center and customer experience software, with 25 years in CX. Its platform, Totalix™, is a full omnichannel contact center that goes live in minutes and runs inside the business applications teams already use, in five editions: Totalix Complete, Totalix for Cisco, Totalix Embedded, Totalix Mobile and, from January 2027, Totalix for Amazon Connect. UWXP, its AI experience layer, runs on specialized small language models. The family also includes UW Knowledge & Assist, UW Insights and AgentNow. Upstream Works sells through more than 50 partners and is ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant. It is headquartered in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada. Learn more at upstreamworks.com.
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Statements about future products, features and availability reflect current plans and may change. Regulatory references summarize published rules for context only and are not legal advice.
Totalix and UWXP are trademarks of Upstream Works Software Ltd. Cisco, Cisco Finesse, Cisco Powered and Webex are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Raya is a trademark of its owner. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.