Anyone using Cisco products and applications as part of their UCC infrastructure knows that the Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance (PCA) tool has already reached its End of Sale. End of support for PCA will follow in the next couple of years. To date, Cisco has not provided a replacement or alternative.
In a recent webinar, we gave an in-depth comparison between the Cisco Prime and Control Hub tool features, and IR Collaborate.
Watch the full webinar
Cisco PCA overview
- Cisco PCA is a feature-rich tool for voice and video performance management and system health. But it is a Cisco-only product, and it is for on-premise Cisco UC systems.
- While some basic features are free, to access more advanced capabilities like enterprise and contact center analytics, there are additional costs.
- PCA allows some customization of events, thresholds, dashboards and reports, but no network correlation or drilldown into the cause of issues.
- PCA has some limitations as to functionality and scalability, which can present problems for large enterprises and service providers using hybrid UC solutions.
Cisco Control Hub overview
- Cisco Control Hub is a ‘point tool’. It supports Webex only, and is a cloud-only product.
- While additional features are being added, its primary function is management, and lacks advanced troubleshooting and analytics features.
- It comes as a default standard pack, and you would need to purchase the ProPack for added functionality.
- Reporting is executed in the cloud, which means submitting and waiting for information to come back.
IR Collaborate features
“Gartner recommends the use of a specialized monitoring tool when implementing a UCaaS solution for enterprise telephony and video conferencing deployments."
A picture paints a thousand words
As a third-party monitoring tool, IR's solutions let you see outside your Cisco network boundary.
Today’s UC ecosystems are more complex than ever. With the advent of hybrid working, organizations no longer deploy simply on-premise or cloud-based UC solutions. They operate using a wide variety of vendors, and disparate devices at multiple remote locations.
Managing your unified communications systems requires complete visibility into every aspect of your UC stack.
IR's solutions provide comprehensive, far-reaching monitoring and troubleshooting analytics and information on the performance of multiple vendor and hybrid UC ecosystems. You get the complete picture, and this means you can trace user experience along its entire journey.
Single pane of glass support
The world has become hybrid. You could be using Avaya for your contact center solutions and Webex for your video conferencing, but there may be other communication platforms like Microsoft Teams or Zoom in the mix for remote workers.
You might have some of your UC on premises, and some in the cloud. You may even have hundreds of endpoint users, and countless devices, in multiple locations.
How will you monitor performance? How will you pinpoint exactly where it went wrong – and most importantly, how do you set metrics, gather analytics and decipher all this information?
IR Collaborate lets you see it and make sense of it all from a customizable, scalable single pane of glass.
Collaborate has been designed to give you access to all the information you need throughout your entire UC environment, but tailored specifically for your organization.
It also gives you the ability to access data and information at your fingertips through a user-friendly dashboard, where you can drill down to get deeper insight with one click.
Collaborate pulls everything together – Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, SBC, devices, connections, and other applications – in one place. There’s no need to switch from one tool to another, logging into different platforms, and trying to piece it all together yourself.
Collaborate gives you access to rich information, and the ability to drill down very quickly to see what went wrong with every meeting participant.
IR has been a long-time Cisco preferred partner, and as such, we understand Cisco systems.
Collaborate helps you see things your way
The key to optimizing your UC environment, is having the ability to look at all the information you need, and that includes every component of your UC system, without having to do anything. While this may sound impossible, it’s what IR Collaborate is designed to do.
With customization around alerts and alarms, tailored displays and creating a functional environment to individual specifications, you can create a seamless user experience across your entire UC environment with IR Collaborate.
Find out more about IR's exclusive Cisco Prime migration offer here.
