Cisco Cisco Prime Unified Service Monitor 9.0 Leaflet
Customer Case Study
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Warner Pacific Insurance Services
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Insurance General Agency
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103 employees
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3-person IT staff
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
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Proactively manage complete Cisco Unified
Communications system
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Simplify troubleshooting
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Obtain real-time voice-quality metrics
NETWORK SOLUTION
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Cisco Unified Communications system
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Cisco Unified Operation Manager
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Cisco Unified Service Monitor
BUSINESS RESULTS
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Gained a unified management view of all
Cisco Unified Communications components
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Improved overall service quality for
employees and customers.
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Saved two hours a week for IT
Insurance Agency IT Group Saves IT Time With Centralized Voice
Management
Warner Pacific Insurance Services uses Cisco Unified Operations Manager
and Cisco Unified Service Monitor to monitor and manage voice quality.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With operations throughout California and Colorado, Warner Pacific Insurance Services
provides insurance agents and brokers with tools, resources, and support to represent a wide
selection of medical, dental, vision, life and other specialty insurance products. Major
insurance carriers use general agencies such as Warner Pacific as a marketing and
distribution channel for their products or as an extension of their own sales and service
force.
With an IT staff of three, Warner Pacific has always regarded efficient network management
as a high priority—one that has become even more important as the network has grown.
When the company first adopted Cisco Unified Communications, the IT team used multiple
management tools, an approach with two serious limitations. One was the lack of a unified
management interface for all solution elements. “If a user called to report a voice quality
problem, the first hurdle was simply finding out the port to which the IP phone was
connected,” says Mike DeDecker, network administrator. This usually required that an IT
staff member stop whatever he was doing and walk over to the phone to investigate. The
other problem was that if an employee complained that voice quality was
poor, the IT group did not have a way to objectively measure packet loss or
jitter to determine the seriousness of the problem and whether its source was
inside or outside the company network. What’s more, IT had no way of
knowing about a problem unless an employee reported it.
Warner Pacific sought a more proactive approach to managing its voice
system. “It takes a long time to manage networks the old-fashioned way: by
pulling reports and looking at past history for a clue to current problems,”
says DeDecker. “We wanted to speed up the troubleshooting process and
therefore provide better service to our employees and our customers.”
NETWORK SOLUTION
Warner Pacific uses Cisco Unified Operations Manager to monitor the operational status of all components of its Cisco Unified
Communications system, including Cisco Unified CallManager, Cisco Unified IP phones, Cisco Unity Messaging, and Cisco Unified
MeetingPlace, as well as the underlying Cisco routers and switches. The visual, dashboard-like interface in Cisco Unified Operations
Manager, which DeDecker constantly keeps open on his PC, clearly shows the relationship among solution components in real time. “I can
find out the status of any phone in the company in about a minute simply by entering its extension,” he says. Previously, DeDecker would
have had to physically walk over to the phone’s location, or ask the phone’s owner to look at the phone jack and tell him the port number.
Diagnostic capabilities in Cisco Unified Operations Manager enable faster trouble isolation and resolution. Therefore, Warner Pacific can
be more proactive, becoming aware of problems, and often resolving them, before employees notice.