It’s now common knowledge that Cisco’s Prime Collaboration Assurance Analytics (PCA) tool is on the way out, with an end-of-sale in October 2021.
To keep your Cisco communications environment up and running, and to make sure you don’t miss a beat, you need a tool that can not only do everything PCA does, but go above and beyond.
IR Collaborate can make your Cisco Prime migration painless and seamless, as well as adding priceless additional value by meeting the needs of your entire organization in key areas:
Engineering
Switching from Cisco Prime to Collaborate means organizations will have visibility throughout their entire UC ecosystem to avoid manually managing multiple tools. This also means faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), with automated alerting and root-cause analysis.
Operations management
You can streamline operations during your Cisco Prime migration by removing the manual processes that create inefficiencies. At the same time, Collaborate will help your organization meet SLAs with proactive solutions to ensure user satisfaction.
IT leadership
Collaborate will deliver digital workplace success by ensuring your employees love to use the technologies you implement. You can drive innovation by enabling your team to focus on strategic initiatives.
A new world of collaboration
When customers first implemented their Cisco PCA tools, it was a vastly different world. Many organizations had a single vendor stack, and cloud technology was in its infancy. Today’s UC environment consists of various types of devices and remote endpoints, multiple platforms and networks, cloud services and different vendors.
Collaborate is a universal monitoring solution that will cover all these tiers and make your Cisco Prime migration seamless by providing a fully comprehensive, end-to-end performance management capability.
The Collaborate difference
Whether your UC environment is on premises, hybrid, or cloud, it’s vital to be able to see the entire ecosystem, and drill down deep into any problems that are occurring. But in many cases, detecting a problem after it has happened is just too late.
Better UC service quality and performance
Downtime, outages, poor quality video and audio, slow upload and download speeds, device issues are just some of the things that can derail an organization’s operations, costing valuable time and money.
When switching from Cisco Prime to IR Collaborate, you get real time visibility so that you can see what’s happening in the present and be proactive instead of reactive. This ability to harness insights has a significant, and immediate impact on an organization’s ROI.
Flexible, seamless deployment
Many organizations are in varying stages and modes of deployment or transition with their UC infrastructure. Some are still fully on-premises, some are moving to cloud services, and some are in a hybrid environment, with on-premises data collected with management, processing, analytics and UX in a private cloud.
Collaborate makes deployment in any mode easy. Moving from one architecture or platform to another can bring considerable risk, but Collaborate provides a ‘safety net’, detecting weakness as they occur, and enabling immediate resolution. This is particularly vital during your Cisco Prime migration.
Collaborate use cases
Collaborate excels in four key areas:
User experience – providing optimization for call and video conferencing, as well as visibility into usage and adoption. Intelligent alerting generates automated alerts to proactively monitor and troubleshoot issues, for example identifying exactly where on the network a device is not working, or audio quality is poor.
Contact centre testing – testing the customer experience 24/7 with Audio Time Analysis (ATA), detecting issues related to availability, functionality or performance. Collaborate’s testing tools like Heartbeat and StressTest also provides IVR testing to provide accurate analytics and valuable system information.
Network mapping & optimization – enabling rapid troubleshooting and root cause isolation across the entire network hub, to a specific user or server within a conference call.
Remote workforce monitoring – Ensuring business continuity with proactive license monitoring, and notifications and alerts when issues happen in real time across the entire remote network. Collaborate provides a dashboard that measures performance, and identifies a specific user who has had quality issues during a call or video conference.
Certificate expiration monitoring
Another important consideration with your Cisco Prime migration is monitoring your certificate expiration. Collaborate can seamlessly take over from Cisco Prime, providing early warnings to help organizations stay on top of certificate and license renewals.
How Collaborate enhances Cisco Webex data
As a long-time Cisco partner, IR offers full support for your complete Cisco environment, including Webex, and can ensure optimization of Webex Meetings by providing:
- Real time view of in-progress, historical and scheduled meetings
- End-to-end view of meeting transactions from overall statistics to individual user metrics
- Dedicated VIP User displays for both historical and in-progress meetings
- Quality metrics including Experience Quality 360 License metrics
- Multi-mode search capability to allow intuitive access to your information
- Access to in-progress and recently closed alerts in a single view
Conclusion
Collaborate is a completely scalable solution, so even those organizations familiar with Cisco Prime, and perhaps nervous about their Cisco Prime migration will find it a worry-free transition.
Collaborate can fill the Cisco Prime gap with all the features you need for Cisco UC, CC and Webex Experience Management.
With any UC migration, customers typically expect to move on to something with improved features and capabilities that can be scaled and can future-proof their business.
Switching from Cisco Prime to IR Collaborate will provide organizations with more than just monitoring and troubleshooting. Experience management within Collaborate encompasses networks, devices, platforms and performance monitoring, ensuring that every user’s ear-to-ear experience is optimized to be seamless.
Want to know more about switching from Cisco Prime? Watch the webinar.
