More and more businesses today are migrating their voice and communications applications to their data network in order to reap the productivity and cost-saving benefits of a converged network. Unlike legacy PBX vendors that emphasize hybrid solutions, which ultimately limit the capabilities of the network, the flexible and scalable Unified Communications System from Cisco provides customers the most immediate and comprehensive productivity-enhancing and cost-effective communications possible.
As unified communications and data networks converge, network management has become essential. The converged network must be secure and resilient while providing significant and immediate productivity gains for not only the end users but also the back-office voice and data management.
Lifecycle Phases of Management
The IP communications solution must cover the full lifecycle of management activities to provide full productivity gains. And because the IP communications solution is more than just voice and data, but rather a suite of voice applications, it's imperative that the IP communications management solution provide a dashboard view into the status of the entire solution.
The Cisco Voice Provisioning tool provides a quick and easy way for provisioning Unified CallManager and Unity systems. Large enterprise deployment scenarios use Cisco Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) Solution to help plan for and optimize the system. The Cisco Unified Management Suite, consisting of the Operations Manager and the Service Monitor, scales from hundreds of phones to more than a hundred thousand phones to meet your operational needs. These tools cover all the phases of the management lifecycle.
Cisco Unified Communications
The Cisco Unified Operations Manager provides an integrated view of the entire Cisco Unified Communications system and presents the current operational status of each element of the IP communications network. It continuously monitors the current operational status of different IP communications elements, such as Cisco Unified CallManager, Cisco Unified CallManager Express, Cisco Unity, Cisco Unity Express, Cisco Unified Contact Center, gateways, routers, and phones, and provides diagnostic capabilities for faster trouble isolation and resolution. Unlike other products that focus on only part of the voice solution or part of the data infrastructure, the Unified Operations Manager is the single dashboard view of the entire solution.
Cisco Unified Service Monitor provides a low-cost, reliable method of monitoring and evaluating the quality of calls in the Cisco Unified Communications system to optimize the user experience. It continuously monitors active calls and provides real-time notification if the voice quality of a call fails to meet a user-defined quality metric. By identifying the problem quickly, the Service Monitor makes it easy to debug in real time rather than long after the problem has occurred.
The Service Monitor uses the Cisco 1040 sensor to collect information on active phone calls. The Cisco 1040 sensor is as easy as plugging into the span port on a switch. It receives Power over Ethernet (POE) for operation. The 1040 sensor then configures itself and starts collecting information on active phone calls. The Service Monitor provides alerts in real-time for calls that have exceeded user-defined thresholdsdisplaying mean opinion scores (MOS) and probable causes for the event.
The Cisco Voice Provisioning Tool (VPT) provides a unified set of provisioning interfaces and services that make the initial setup and ongoing administration of Cisco Unified CallManager and Cisco Unity faster, easier, and more efficient. Cisco VPT provides a system-level approach to management by combining the most common user attributes from multiple Cisco Unified CallManager and Cisco Unity servers. By providing a single point of entry for administrators, Cisco VPT creates a simple, workflow-based environment that makes managing Cisco Unified Communications deployments more intuitive.
The Cisco Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) Solution provides enterprise customers who have business critical applications with the ability to plan for new deployments, ensuring the unified communication systems isn't impacted by application deployments and visa versa.
