Cisco Prime Collaboration
Simplified, Unified Management of Collaboration Networks

Cisco Prime Collaboration:

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 networks, services, endpoints, and collaboration architectures. They also must meet demands from end users for anywhere, anytime network access with 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 netwok 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. The solution helps ensure a superior end-user quality of experience, lowers operating expenses, and 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, proactive troubleshooting, and long-term trending and analytics 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

Provisioning features include automated processes for Cisco® Unified Communications and Cisco TelePresence® 1 initial deployments and for "day-2" moves, adds, changes, and deletions (MACDs). An intuitive user interface provides a single view of a subscriber and the subscriber's services (see Figure 1) as well as a consolidated view of subscribers across the organization. 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, by significantly simplifying moves, adds, and changes, the solution facilitates delegation of these tasks - allowing organizations to optimize IT resources and further reduce total cost of ownership.

Figure 1. User/Subscriber Services View

Assurance

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, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2. User-Defined Summary View

Cisco Prime Collaboration proactively notifies operators of issues and facilitates speedy resolution of problems through proactive fault detection and rapid isolation using purpose-built diagnostic tools. For video, the solution allows operators to view end-to-end session paths over Cisco and third-party devices, and on Cisco Medianet routers, jitter and packet loss statistics help pinpoint hotspots affecting session quality (see Figures 3 and 4). As a result, Cisco Prime Collaboration expedites operator resolution of service quality issues before affecting end users - for a superior end-user collaborative experience.

Figure 3. Video End-to-End Session Path Trace View

Figure 4. Medianet Path View

Longer Term Trending and Analysis

Using the Analytics module, Cisco Prime Collaboration also provides historical reporting of key performance indicators (KPIs) and helps enable IT network managers to analyze trends for capacity planning, resource optimization, and quality of service. The solution helps track collaboration technology adoption rates in the network and provides metrics to help analyze how users are actually using the collaboration endpoints daily (see Figure 5). It also provides insights into key collaboration network resource usage trends. With one year's worth of historical data, many options to slice and dice the reports, and easy report customization, Cisco Prime Collaboration provides actionable information to IT managers, planners, and executives. This information simplifies the long-term planning process, informs ongoing technology investment decisions, and helps optimize the network configuration to improve end-user quality of experience.

Figure 5. Analytics Technology Adoption View