The collaboration market has been evolving over the last 10 years, with more and more enterprises putting strategies in place for investing in collaboration or Unified Communications, and employees driving greater and greater adoption. As we all know, the promise of this technology is to enable organizations of all sizes to exchange information, speed decision-making, and enhance training. And, at the same time, it helps employees save time, enabling them to increase their personal productivity.
However, to make the potential of collaboration a reality, organizations require more than network devices, applications, and endpoints. They need a powerful management solution to help them control costs, simplify operations, deliver a superior user experience, and extract the full value from their unified communications and collaboration technology investment.
In this tough economic climate, organizations are seeking better ways to reduce operating expenses associated with collaboration solutions and lower their total cost of ownership. Their IT groups need to minimize the complexity of running a network infrastructure that is hampered by siloed, disparate, complex management products. Traditionally, these scattered, nonintegrated tools make it difficult to troubleshoot problems; provision new users; or perform moves, adds, changes, and deletions (MACDs).
At the same time, organizations have limited resources, and they need to make the most of an expensive, highly skilled IT staff. That means freeing them from manual, administrative functions to concentrate on more strategic tasks. IT organizations also focus on providing the best possible quality of experience to end users. And again, although collaboration can transform business processes, it will not be successful unless an organization can encourage its adoption and consistent use. The best way to promote adoption is to deliver a highly available, trouble-free solution that can complement and work smoothly with existing network services. Minimizing service degradation and quality-of-service concerns dramatically enhances the end-user experience, and lets operators avoid expensive and time-consuming system and service outages.
Cisco Prime Collaboration: An Integrated Solution for Collaboration Management
Recently Cisco announced our new simplified, unified solution for management of voice and video networks—Cisco Prime Collaboration. Designed specifically for Cisco Collaboration environments that include Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco TelePresence and desktop video systems, Cisco Prime Collaboration helps our customers deliver on that collaboration technology promise and realize the best return on their technology investment. For those of you familiar with our previous collaboration management products, this new release merges all of those products into one integrated voice and video voice solution that includes both automated, accelerated voice provisioning and comprehensive service assurance management across voice and video networks. Specifically, Cisco Prime Collaboration enables IT organizations to:
- Monitor and test the entire voice and video network from a single product, reducing cost and complexity
- Provision new phone users and apply changes efficiently, to accelerate site rollouts and maintenance
- Proactively identify and resolve problems, to maintain the highest quality of service while minimizing the effect of problems on services and users
- Inventory all collaboration network assets, including real-time records of location, licensing, and version information
With Cisco Prime Collaboration, organizations can take advantage of Cisco best practices to not only enhance provisioning and assurance processes, but also build strategic insight into the network. I encourage you to read this white paper and learn more now!
