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Cisco Prime Collaboration

Cisco Prime Collaboration

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Deliver superior end-user quality of experience and lower operating expenses with simplified, unified management across voice and video collaboration networks.

Enterprise networks are undergoing continuous transformation as organizations invest in next-generation collaboration technologies with integrated voice and video deployments. IT departments must be empowered to effectively manage this transformation and the lifecycle of these services, networks, endpoints, and collaboration architectures. They also must meet demands from end users for anywhere, anytime network access with a consistent high quality of service. At the same time, these organizations are under increasing pressure to reduce operating expenses and optimize limited resources.
Traditional siloed, nonintegrated management tools have made it difficult for collaboration network operators to quickly and effectively troubleshoot issues, provision new users, or perform changes. The result is collaboration management operations that are complex, manual, error prone, and inefficient.
Cisco Prime™ Collaboration addresses these challenges by providing simplified, unified management for voice and video networks that:

• Helps ensure a superior end-user quality of experience

• Lowers operating expenses

• Allows enterprises to extract the full value from their unified communications and collaboration technology investment

Cisco Prime Collaboration Overview

Cisco Prime Collaboration removes management complexity and provides automated, accelerated provisioning, real-time monitoring, and proactive troubleshooting in one integrated product.
The solution delivers a premier operations experience through an intuitive user interface and optimized operator methodology, including automated workflows, that ease implementation and ongoing administration.
Provisioning features include automated processes for Cisco® Unified Communications initial deployments and for "day-2" moves, adds, changes, and deletions (MACDs). With these capabilities, Cisco Prime Collaboration significantly accelerates site rollouts and dramatically reduces the time required for ongoing changes, resulting in exceptional productivity gains and lower operating expenses. In addition, simplification and automation facilitate delegation of moves, adds, and changes - allowing organizations to optimize IT resources and further reduce total cost of ownership.
Cisco Prime Collaboration provides efficient, integrated service assurance management through a single, consolidated view of the Cisco voice and video collaboration environment. This includes continuous, real-time monitoring and advanced troubleshooting tools for Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco TelePresence® systems including the underlying transport infrastructures. The solution proactively notifies operators of issues and facilitates speedy resolution of problems through proactive fault detection and rapid isolation using purpose-built diagnostic tools. As a result, Cisco Prime Collaboration expedites operator resolution of service quality issues before affecting end users - for a superior end-user collaborative experience.

Provisioning Features and Benefits

• A single interface allows for efficient configuration and provisioning of Cisco Unified Communications sites and services, including call control, messaging, and presence. This lifecycle management approach maximizes productivity for administrators, lowers training requirements, and promotes network security.

• Policy-based, automated management of Cisco Unified Communications subscriber services that aligns with enterprise rules, workflow, and delegation provides improved operational consistency and control. This includes configuration defaults that provide the ability to automatically configure and deploy the Cisco Unified Communications voice infrastructure in a consistent way and to easily delegate these tasks.

• Bulk and template-based provisioning capabilities significantly enhance operator productivity, reduce time to deploy and make changes, and drive cost savings - especially for large-scale deployments where manual processes can be extremely time-consuming. Scheduled batch provisioning capabilities promote high-speed mass infrastructure changes (for example, provisioning a new calling search space) as well as rapid day-1 deployments and day-2 mass additions and changes across Cisco Unified Communications services.

• Role and domain-based access control and tracking of all provisioning activity promote improved control, accountability, and long-term consistency to reduce troubleshooting time.

• A northbound web services API simplifies workflow automation across other business, directory, or security systems.

• Self-care enables end users to set up lines, manage services, and configure phone options quickly and easily, reducing IT overhead.

Assurance Features and Benefits

• Real-time monitoring with a single "pane of glass" for Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco TelePresence networks allows operators to efficiently manage all collaboration devices across multiple clusters and multiple geographical locations and gain end-to-end voice and video application and network performance visibility. The solution presents the current operational status of the collaboration systems through real-time service-level views of the network.

• Dashboard summaries allow operators to view network status at a glance, including end-user impact and infrastructure health across the collaboration voice and video environment, and facilitate quick identification of potential problems. Dashboards also provide instant access to best practices troubleshooting workflows for expedited issue resolution.

• As a single repository for all collaboration inventories, Cisco Prime Collaboration collects data from a wide variety of data sources, performing a deep discovery on endpoints and infrastructure, recording the type of devices and the cluster relationships, which are then displayed graphically to help the operator visualize the collaboration network.

• Alarm correlation facilitates event notification reduction and helps to provide actionable information to operators on the fault monitor display and through email and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) forwarding.

• Advanced troubleshooting tools, including traffic simulation and testing of circuits and endpoints, help reduce mean time to repair and improve end-user satisfaction.

Voice Assurance

• Cisco Prime Collaboration monitors, provides alerts, and generates reports on user-experience metrics associated with voice quality for calls controlled by the Cisco Unified Communications system.

• The solution provides a full network view of phones, servers, and infrastructure as well as cluster-level grouping with automated discovery that identifies the role of every device and application in the Cisco Unified Communications network.

• The solution detects operational faults with voice-application-aware intelligence, and the resulting alerts facilitate rapid troubleshooting with pop-up dialogues launching context-sensitive links to the appropriate management service for that device.

• A diagnostic portal groups key performance indicators (KPIs) by device type and provides multiple statistic overlay graphs that facilitate rapid isolation of performance issues.

• Advanced diagnostic testing tools allow operators to run both real-time and scheduled tests; check for dial tone, registration, and end-to-end communication; test links with IP service-level agreement (IP SLA) to isolate jitter and packet loss; and verify that emergency calling and phone features are working.

Video Assurance

• The solution provides real-time, unified views of all Cisco TelePresence sessions in progress - as well as those scheduled or completed - including end-to-end visibility into media paths for each video session.

• Cisco Prime Collaboration allows Cisco TelePresence operators to rapidly isolate problems to the network or endpoint and identify latency, jitter, and packet loss - for accelerated troubleshooting and reduced mean time to repair.

• Real-time diagnostics include a view of end-to-end video session paths over Cisco and third-party devices, including:

– A view of CPU, memory, and interface statistics on Cisco routers to locate bottlenecks in the network.

– A view of jitter and packet loss statistics and differentiated services code point (DSCP) information on Cisco Medianet routers to pinpoint hotspots affecting session quality.

– Synthetic video traffic initiated from network devices leveraging IP SLA Video Operations to assess video performance on a network.

IT organizations focus on providing the best possible quality of experience (QoE) to end users. Although rich collaboration can transform business processes, it will not be successful unless an organization can encourage its adoption and consistent use. Cisco Prime Collaboration helps drive that adoption by enabling operators to easily and rapidly provision and assure highly available, trouble-free Cisco collaboration services. With automated processes and integrated monitoring and troubleshooting across Cisco voice and video networks, Cisco Prime Collaboration also allows organizations to minimize management complexity and realize significant operational efficiencies and lower operating expenses.

About Cisco Prime

The Cisco Prime portfolio of IT and service provider management offerings empowers IT organizations to more effectively manage their networks and the services they deliver. Built on a service-centric foundation, the Cisco Prime portfolio of products supports integrated lifecycle management through an intuitive workflow-oriented user experience and a set of common operational attributes.

For More Information

For more information about Cisco Prime Collaboration, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/primecollaboration, contact your local account representative, or send an email to the Cisco product marketing group at ask-primecollaboration@cisco.com.