Cisco Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance 11.5 White Paper

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Voice and video collaboration lets companies tap the full potential and deep experience of their workforce and

quickly deliver knowledge anywhere around the world - without the cost and logistics involved in arranging travel.
With a few clicks of a mouse, a team at a company’s main office can set up and join a voice or videoconference

with customers or colleagues to plan, share information, and address new challenges.

Web sharing capabilities can augment voice and video collaboration solutions, enabling enterprises to collaborate

on documents or work closely together to solve problems with fewer misunderstandings, better clarity, and a more

productive workforce. With new mobile devices and services, companies can extend collaboration beyond

traditional settings to desktops and mobile devices, training rooms, kiosks in public areas, or other sites.

Managing a Complex Environment

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.

Cost control is always top-of-mind in a tough economic climate, so organizations are seeking better ways to reduce

operating expenses (OpEx) associated with collaboration solutions, and lower their total cost of ownership (TCO).

To achieve these cost reductions, 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, budget-conscious 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

strategic tasks such as developing infrastructure upgrade strategies and creating and deploying new services.

IT organizations also focus on providing the best possible quality of experience (QoE) to end users. Although rich

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 (QoS) concerns dramatically enhances the end-user QoE, and lets operators avoid expensive

and time-consuming system and service outages.

Advantages of an Integrated Management Solution

Collaboration networks are highly complex, with multiple applications, services, and network devices that must

work together with clockwork precision. In many cases, organizations are integrating their existing voice and video

environments, thereby introducing additional layers of complexity, and possibly pushing network bandwidth and

performance to their limits.

As the complexity of collaboration infrastructures grows, visibility is essential for supporting these challenging

environments. IT organizations need the ability to inventory all network assets and connectivity, as well as monitor

and test the entire voice and video network. Their management solution must not only deliver this insight in real

time, but also use historical data to help network administrators accurately visualize network trends.