Provisining Tools: Stack8 & Akkadian

[Stephanie Knoop]

Hello, Community.  I'm curious if there are users of these applications out there who would not mind sharing information with me about their experience.  Happy to have a private message or public post.  Also if there is anyone who truly believes Prime Provisioning can hold a candle to these apps, please tell me why.  Areas of inquiry:

- Functionality, ease of set up and use for Helpdesk staff (not engineers) to provision UC services

- Support from the vendor, particularly with respect to keeping up with Cisco product versions/suites (Cloud integrations?)

- Any comparative data from trials you may have done.

Thanks to all.

Stephanie

[dbench001]

Hi Stephanie,

We deployed SMACS (Stack8) approximately 1.5 years ago.  From day 0, we have been pleased with both the product, and with support.  Like many Cisco UC customers, we needed a product to assist with the daily moves, adds and changes.  We decided to go with Stack 8 for two reasons:

1.  One of our peer companies was using SMACS and they highly recommended it. 

2.  Out of the couple of products we evaluated, the Stack 8 demo sold itself.  The engineer that performed the demo was very knowledgeable and everything within the demo worked exactly like it should.

Since deploying SMACS, I honestly do not think we could live without it.  Using SMACS for provisioning has dropped the configuration time to approximately 1-2 minutes per user (for a help desk level technician).  This configuration time includes the user, phone and Jabber configuration.  Additionally, support from SMACS has been very professional and they are always knowledgeable.  We recently completed a Cisco CUCM upgrade from 11.0 to 11.5.  When it came time to upgrade the SMACS piece, Stack 8 support assisted with the upgrade and the upgrade went very smooth.

I would highly recommend the Stack 8 product.

I hope this helps. 

Dustin

[colbea1]

Hello Stephanie,

How are you? I dont have any valid input to add to your article, but I wanted to reach out and see if you learned anything since posting in 2018? I ask because my company is looking at going with Akkadian, so I was hoping you may have some input. When time permits let me know. Thank you, Anthony 

[williamscal]

Not sure if you have received a reply to this, but we recently integrated Akkadian Provisioning Manager with our CUCM 12.0 and CUC 12.0 environment. I would be happy to answer some questions. I am by no means a Sr. SME on Akkadian, but was involved with the installation process to the provisioning process within our environment and still managing it today.