CDW is a leading technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the US, Canada and the UK. CDW is a Fortune 500 company with multinational capabilities and 8,700 employees.
CDW have used a variety of solutions to monitor and manage unified communications, but having a solution that would provide the flexibility to investigate user experience deeply in real-time would add significant value in allowing them to proactively solve customer problems.
“The biggest difference is that the network monitoring tools can monitor and manage the voice infrastructure to a certain extent, but Prognosis can get into the user experience.”
Customers care about the voice experience. Voice is a sensitive and integral part of business operations; it’s critical. For one CDW customer a single minute of voice downtime equates to a loss of approximately $125,000. Preventing downtime is crucial.
Solution
CDW use Prognosis for UC (Service Provider Edition) for Cisco HCS, Cisco Telepresence, Cisco UBE, Cisco UCCE, Acme Packet and Cisco Video Endpoint.
They also use Prognosis for Contact Center to manage Cisco UCCE and are connecting Prognosis to their ITSM: ServiceNow.
Benefits
Prognosis gives CDW the flexibility to deliver creative solutions for their customers in real-time such as; synthetic tracing, building ad hoc dashboards, and creating custom threshold alerts on the fly.
At one point, there was a bug when a couple of services went above 80/85 days. Within 5 minutes, CDW built a display for their entire customer base to isolate those services, create a visual alarm and a threshold alert that would trigger if these limits were approached.
CDW estimates Prognosis saves them on average 1 - 1.5 hours per customer generated incident; a potential saving of between 140 - 210 hours a month for the team or between 13 - 19 hours per engineer per month.
Prognosis allows CDW to identify what phone firmware version is in use by their customers allowing them to avoid bugs associated with that version. This saves a huge amount of time and helps prevent outages.
CDW use the license “inactive” report in Prognosis to help their customers identify which licenses are in use and which aren’t. Their customers end up saving on their license fees as they are not paying for licenses they don’t need.
Another report that proved valuable was the Unity Connection mailbox full report. This helped CDW to proactively discover a dead customer service mailbox that was unattended.
Without Prognosis QBR preparation (data collection, analysis and presentation) took an estimated 24 hours, with Prognosis it only takes only 5 hours. CDW use many Prognosis reports to provide meaningful data about their UC environment.
Intermittent call quality issues is another pain point the team commonly must solve. CDW use Prognosis to create a custom threshold for the customer to isolate the issue. It’s estimated this can save the customer over a week of investigation.
Multiple alerts make up an SLA and KPI. Combining SLAs and keeping track of KPIs in the one place to measure effectively can be difficult. Prognosis makes it easy for CDW by tying the two together.
“With Prognosis, we can proactively prevent future outages for all our customers. Being able to do that in under 5 minutes - that’s powerful.”
Andy Kleinheinz
UC Technical Architect: Managed Services - CDW
