Customer example

Industry: Financial Services Region: EMEA Collaboration Technology: Unified Communications

Situation

IntroductionA global leader in consumer and business credit reporting wanted deploy a Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (PCCE) solution and move its IPPBX to its centralized data center. However, the Cisco Customer Experience team wanted the company evaluate its existing network beforehand to ensure it could properly handle the new capacity requirements. Reluctantly, the customer agreed, but its executives noted that:

All bandwidth requirements had been met

The network was highly redundant

IP routing was in good shape

Network devices all met software and hardware requirements

There were no known issues in the network

ExpectationsThe customer expected the Cisco Customer Experience team to run the network readiness assessment and:

Validate that the network was both ready for deployment and sturdy enough to serve as the foundation for future voice and video expansion

Uncover any caveats or issues that could pose a threat to the Unified Communications (UC) experience

Provide guidelines for a seamless network transition from the old IPPBX to Cisco's technologies

Review the network and provide any hardware and software requirements

Solution

The Cisco Customer Experience team began its assessment by first understanding the customer’s business requirements and capturing information related to key sites. After some initial digging, the team identified eight sites and two data centers, all spread across different geographic locations.Cisco then installed its proprietary software at the first data center to begin the network audit and simultaneously set up a network probe at each of the different eight sites to simulate real-time RTP traffic.The software's purpose was to generate synthetic traffic and monitor the key parameters (i.e. jitter, delay, packet loss, etc.), which helped the team understand what the challenges or outcomes might be for production traffic.

Results and value proposition

The assessment identified that the IP routing between the key sites was not configured properly and convergence time was too high so that it caused network packet drops. It also helped to identify that:

Quality of service (QoS) was deployed 7-8 years prior and never revisited for real-time applications (voice and video)

Network load-balancing had issues

Bandwidth was not configured properly to handle the amount of traffic to be deployed

Multiple devices were found running end-of-sale software and only a few of those were identified as end of life announced by Cisco.

Value proposition:The assessment uncovered gaps in the customer's hardware and software lifecycle process for Cisco devices. It also:

Helped the customer to better understand the requirements for successful UC deployment

Set a baseline that can be leveraged for future deployments

Alerted the customer to update the QoS and network policies for better user experience

Although the customer was initially hesitant on investing extra money into an assessment, it found that its network would have likely crashed with the new deployment if it had ignored Cisco's recommendation. This would have cost millions and would have required an all-hands-on-deck effort to fix the problem.

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