Cisco Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.3.2 Information Guide
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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One of the realities of being a managed service provider is that unplanned service requests are an everyday
occurrence. “Recently, a customer was moving their production environment, but they neglected to tell us about
occurrence. “Recently, a customer was moving their production environment, but they neglected to tell us about
one of their on-
premise call managers,” says David McGrath, chief sales and marketing officer. “With the current
manual processes, it would take us days to migrate the second call manager after we found out about it. With
Cisco IAC, we can apply the automated workflow that we used for the first call manager to migrate the second and
execute this
in a matter of minutes without engaging any of our engineers.”
Business Results
By the end of 2013, Cisco IAC will touch all ASE customers. According to McGrath, “One important attribute about
Cisco IAC is that it supports diverse cloud deployments, which is preparing us to serve an expanding customer
base that is seeking enterprise-
class IT services.”
In the process of building an agile and flexible foundation for service delivery, the company has some measurable
results. So far, the company sees greater efficiency in service delivery and service transparency through the
catalog. The process of receiving a customer order and delivering it has been shortened by at least 90 percent,
and the deployment is still early. For example, since ASE deployed Cisco IAC, onboarding and setting up a
customer with infrastructure now takes minutes rather than days or hours.
ASE was an early provider of cloud solutions, and the company continues to stay close to the market in order to be
ahead of trends. “We know that customers are interested in portals and online service catalogs. Those capabilities
ahead of trends. “We know that customers are interested in portals and online service catalogs. Those capabilities
are part of the Cisco IAC solution, which gives us confidence that we can be ahead of the curve in delivering those
self-
service capabilities to our customers,” says McGrath.
All ASE offerings are designed in a modular fashion, and the range of choices that are available in these
environments is extensive. “We have more than 100 different product lines that we can put into an online service
environments is extensive. “We have more than 100 different product lines that we can put into an online service
catalog, and that list is growing all t
he time,” says McGrath. “The goal is to enable customers to create complete
environments, including servers, storage solutions, applications, managed applications, network environments, and
load balancers. By having all of these options in an online service catalog, we expect that it will prompt customers
to consider options that they may not have thought of, and that will lead to larger orders.”
to consider options that they may not have thought of, and that will lead to larger orders.”
McGrath is also confident that the self-service capabilities will play an important role in customer satisfaction and
retention. “We have found that by the time a design moves into production, customers may forget about features
that they ordered. As a result, they may be left feeling that they didn’t get all of the capabilities that they thought
retention. “We have found that by the time a design moves into production, customers may forget about features
that they ordered. As a result, they may be left feeling that they didn’t get all of the capabilities that they thought
they were ordering. By effectively exposing more of these functions through the Cisco Cloud Portal catalog that is
part of Cisco IAC, we believe customers will be aware of and use more functions. The more they love about our
services, the more likely they will be to stay wit
h us for a long time.”
ASE is confident that it will be able to measure most of the improvements that it realizes from Cisco IAC. However,
one of the most important benefits is not something that the company expects to measure but values quite highly.
“The morale of our professional staff is extremely important to us. We want to challenge our engineers in ways that
are fulfilling to them as IT professionals,” says Sjoquist. “One of the ways we can do this is by using Cisco IAC to
“The morale of our professional staff is extremely important to us. We want to challenge our engineers in ways that
are fulfilling to them as IT professionals,” says Sjoquist. “One of the ways we can do this is by using Cisco IAC to
automate routine, tedious tasks like server provisioning, freeing up skilled engineers to work on new projects and
programs.”
programs.”