Cisco Instant Connect is a platform that enables push-to-talk (PTT) communications in a Cisco Unified Communications (UC) suite of products and other devices such as third-party radios and smartphones. It allows users to use their own devices that are the Apple IOS or Android operating systems and to use supported Cisco Unified IP Phone models to create an on-premises PTT solution. Cisco Instant Connect allows redundancy, flexibility and scalability of various components of the solution. It also provides a virtual IP address that clients can use to connect to the system. This virtual IP address is supported for logging in and media allocation purposes.