Cisco Prime Active Catalog Data Sheet

The Challenge

Today’s service providers must have the ability to quickly offer new and innovative services that span multiple technology domains to capitalize on dynamic market opportunities. The challenge to meeting this goal is that these domains are commonly decentralized into individual business groups and a service provider may also use a third party for specific service offerings. This makes service assembly a complex process.

Assembling cross-domain services across disjointed supply chains and preparing to deliver them can require 12 to 18 months. To fulfill orders, service providers must manually review orders, dismantle them, and generate suborders to each domain “supplier”. Any notifications or reworks must be handled manually as well. To remain competitive, service providers need a tool that alleviates these challenges and facilitates innovation and agility. The ability to accelerate the design and fulfillment of services is crucial to meeting customer expectations.

Product Overview

Cisco Prime^™ Active Catalog utilizes extensive automation capabilities to bring together the people, processes, and products required to accelerate the discovery, assembly, launch, and orchestration of new services across multiple domains. It facilitates a highly flexible and efficient, end-to-end service fulfillment process to increase revenue, reduce operating expenses, and improve customer satisfaction.

Cisco Prime Active Catalog uses a standards-based catalog-driven service delivery model to accelerate the design and fulfillment of services by providing full lifecycle management of technical service products that utilize the full value of the underlying multitechnology, multivendor network. The solution discovers and catalogs resource-facing capabilities from participating technology domains, assembles them into viable service bundles, and exposes them to customer-facing ordering systems so they can be offered “on demand” and “at scale” in a multitenant, elastic environment.

Benefits

Cisco Prime Active Catalog:

●   Increases revenues by accelerating the design, assembly, and launch of new services

●   Extends the service provider portfolio to expand market penetration, increase service revenue, and help enable products to be easily improved throughout their full lifecycle

●   Synchronizes network capabilities with customer needs to avoid disjointed service offerings

●   Reduces cost by automatically decomposing orders into constituent parts across multiple technology domains

●   Minimizes order processing overhead to reduce operational expenses

●   Increases customer satisfaction through the ability to offer a more comprehensive product portfolio

●   Matches front office promises to back office capabilities to better meet customer expectations

Features

Cisco Prime Active Catalog provides:

●   Discovery: Automatically discovers and uploads capabilities from multiple domains and multivendor suppliers

●   Assembly: Uses Cisco componentization principles to decouple product lifecycle management from underlying systems and publishes them as technical product specifications. Tiered catalog layers are supported as well

●   Fulfillment: Receives technical service orders from the customer relationship management (CRM)/portal, dismantles them, and orchestrates the requests to the appropriate “supplier” across internal domains and third-party business-to-business environments

Use Case Example: Simplified Cross-Domain Management

Traditionally, service providers must compile and integrate service components across domains to create new services, a process that commonly takes from 12 to 18 months. When a new service order is received, it must be manually reviewed, decomposed into its various service components, and used to generate suborders to each domain “supplier.” In this case, one simple order could result in several suborders being manually placed on collaboration, cloud, transport, access, and customer premises equipment domain suppliers. Any notification or reworks must be handled manually as well.(See Figure 1).

On the design side, supplier domains expose their services to be automatically discovered by Cisco Prime Active Catalog and added to cross-domain catalogs. Comprehensive rules manage factors such as which services are dependent upon others and which must be excluded while others are being applied. These services can then be quickly assembled into viable service bundles and published through a third-party customer-facing ordering system where they can be ordered by customers. In this way, services can be created in substantially less time. (See Figure 2).

On the fulfillment side, Cisco Prime Active Catalog receives technical service orders from the CRM/portal, automatically decomposes them, and then orchestrates the requests through the catalog hierarchy to the appropriate “supplier” domains. With this approach, if any component of a service changes, these changes are automatically carried into the fulfillment process. When used as part of Cisco Prime Order Fulfillment, this entire process is handled automatically from design to fulfillment, including validation, enforcing, assigning, and building relevant resource models for subscriber, service, and network objects.

About Cisco Prime

The Cisco Prime portfolio of IT and service provider management offerings empowers organizations to more effectively manage their networks and the services they deliver. Built on a service-centered foundation, Cisco Prime supports integrated lifecycle management through an intuitive workflow-oriented user experience, providing A-to-Z management for evolved programmable networks, mobility, video, cloud, and managed services.