Industry: Federal judicial services Region: Americas Technology: UC/Conferencing/TelePresence
Background
A federal judicial services customer in the US was debating how it could better optimize its on-premises infrastructure - voice, Jabber, Cisco TelePresence® technology - yet migrate to a cloud environment with its other infrastructure - Webex Meetings, Webex Messenger, Webex Teams®. It saw value in keeping some of its infrastructure on-premises, such as its audio solution, because leadership wanted to get full value from their existing on-premise investment and had some time left until it was end-of-support. The customer also wanted to alleviate any risks in moving to the cloud, so it called Cisco's Customer Experience team to perform a Cloud Collaboration Readiness Assessment and figure out how it could safely move to a hybrid cloud environment.
Cisco enters
As the Cisco team began understanding the customer's requirements and goals, it learned that the customer only wanted an Advisory and Recommendation Service, based on its existing collaboration solution and products. Details of the assessment included:
The Cisco Customer Experience consultants also wanted to understand the customer's vision and strategy with respect to cloud collaboration. Through a rigorous question-and-answer framework, the Cisco team was able to discover:
Lastly, the Cisco team laid out certain expectations as well. The customer would ensure that use cases, journey maps, and security policies would be provided, along with access to existing information pertaining to collaboration high-level design, network diagrams, call metrics, and more.
Initial findings
In the beginning of the CCRA, the Cisco team verified the top collaboration use cases and workflows, starting with the ones that would migrate first to the hybrid cloud platform.
The workshop and follow-up interviews then revealed the customer's need to:
Discussion
When the TDM environment was analyzed, the Cisco team noticed that it was not only costing the customer much more than a SIP network, but it was also more difficult to manage, as the TDM circuits were distributed across different locations. By moving to an SIP network, the customer could centralize its deployment and consolidate all the circuits into two data centers. This would result in both time and operational savings, as the customer could now manage a fewer number of sites now and could more quickly track the network's performance.
Up until this point, the audio and video solution had separate call controls (CUCM and VCS), which had operational and management overheads. The CCRA analysis found that centralizing call control for both audio and video would result in unified management and operations, thereby reducing OpEx. Plus, since the customer wanted to realize its existing on-premise investment in Cisco Communications Manager, it made sense to first migrate their video solution to the Cloud using Cisco WebEx Hybrid Services (Meetings and Messaging).
Centralizing call control was definitely an important recommendation, but learning how audio and video solutions were managed separately also helped the team understand what tools were being used to manage the solution. Because there were so many, no single collaboration solution was tied together with another. This meant that if the customer wanted to self-manage and automate its operations, different requirements would need to be established to aggregate the different collaboration solutions to work as one cohesive unit.
Through the CCRA, the customer was able to bridge the gap between IT and business leadership and find common ground. Up until this point, the IT team had come up with several ideas to improve the company's operations but it didn't completely align with the business leadership's mission, vision, and desired collaboration capabilities. When Cisco's Customer Experience team was consulted, it was able to clearly communicate several of the IT team’s prior recommendations to the executive team, show the value of how each recommendation complimented the others, and tie the whole solution in with leadership's objectives (i.e. move to the cloud and reduce OpEx).
The customer was also made aware of architecture, security, and wireless gaps, recent Cisco Cloud Collaboration solution offerings, and different consumption models to take advantage of during the migration process.
Consequently, the Cisco Customer Experience team was able to succinctly endorse and advocate the move to a hybrid cloud and provide insights into how the solution would reduce OpEx for the customer. The team also helped the customer understand the necessary commitments and steps it would take to formulate a solid migration plan (i.e. through a phased approach), which would alleviate future risks and concerns.
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