Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance and Analytics tool (PCA) has been the monitoring and diagnostics tool of choice for many organizations using Cisco products. In a recent blog, we discussed Cisco’s announcement that it will be discontinued, with end-of-sale taking effect from October 14th, 2021. From that point, there will be no additional enhancements or developments on the product, other than mission critical fixes.
While current Cisco PCA customers can keep using the solution until October 31st, 2024, beyond this date, they will need to migrate and utilize another collaboration management solution.
Exclusive Cisco Prime Migration Offer Now Available for a Limited Time
With Cisco Prime's imminent end of sale, IR has teamed up with Cisco as their Preferred Solution Partner to support your migration from Cisco Prime (PCA) to IR Collaborate. This exclusive offer is now available for a limited time.
What does this mean for enterprises?
Many organizations are already thinking about what’s next. PCA is a mission critical tool, but with Cisco offering no replacement product, how will you make sure that your Cisco communications systems are always up and running, and performing optimally?
Even though Cisco’s PCA tool won’t reach end-of-life for another three years, there will be no further innovation or enhancements to PCA. Many enterprise businesses are realizing that given the events of the last 12 months, preparation and anticipation are key factors in maintaining business continuity. Can you really afford to have your business-critical systems monitored by outdated tech? Do you act now and begin to implement alternative solutions? What other tools are out there, and will they integrate with your systems?
There are a great many more communication tools available. Today, I’ll discuss in more depth the options available from IR, and how our monitoring and performance management solutions can bring added value to your organization.
Can IR Collaborate replace Cisco PCA?
The short answer is absolutely! IR has been a Cisco preferred solution Partner for over 18 years. As a Cisco R&D sponsored development partner, IR continues to place significant investment in developing solutions to support Cisco platforms. This includes Webex Meetings monitoring, which will be available from June 2021.
What can IR Collaborate do?
The communications world is changing rapidly, revealing increasing technological capabilities, multiple platforms and countless remote users and endpoint scenarios within this space.
IR Collaborate can help organizations expand from a Cisco only solution to a multi-vendor solution, where your entire collaboration ecosystem can be viewed from a single pane of glass.
Collaborate provides multiple ways to look at your environment. For example, by department, by geographic location, executive group, device pool, or video conferencing group. And Collaborate makes it easy to customize that view. Through IR’s customized dashboards you can:
- Identify voice and video quality issues 79% faster in real time, leading to immediate resolution, often before users even know there is a problem.
- Pinpoint the exact location of a device that isn’t performing (for example a camera not connected or a router issue).
- Experience a 49% decrease in outages by understanding what is happening across all architectures. In a contact censer environment for example, this is particularly important as it directly impacts your customers.
- Test and validate systems to make sure they can accommodate potential overloads (for example can it take an increase in extra traffic or 5,000 extra web RTC hits in an hour).
IR Collaborate solution capabilities
Collaborate switches performance management from reactive to proactive, addressing issues in real time – as they’re occurring.
Remote monitoring
One of Collaborate’s capabilities that is of extreme importance in today’s working environment is remote monitoring. Collaborate allows precise call monitoring for every endpoint user both internally and externally. For example, you can determine how, why, when and where a call failed. Was it due to user error, network issues, device problems? Collaborate allows you to pinpoint the incident, and even prevent it from recurring - maintaining optimal call quality no matter where a user is located.
Immediate benefits for your organization
In our current environment, one of the top objectives for executives in organizations is keeping employees motivated, engaged and productive. As a result of a number of surveys, we found an immediate positive impact on ROI by using the Collaborate performance management solution. We found an ongoing cost reduction in the overall operational costs comparing:
- Organizations that have no monitoring solutions
- Organizations that have vendor-supplied solutions
- Organizations that use specialized monitoring solutions like IR’s Collaborate
Collaborate offers performance management solutions for any organization, whether their communications and collaboration environment is in the cloud, on premises, or hybrid. We support Cisco as well as a multi-vendor and multi-platform collaboration systems.
For more detailed information on the end of Cisco PCA, and what it means for your organization, watch our webinar below.
