Having a lot of fun this year at Interop 2012. We are shooting and editing in a much tighter workflow so that we can publish these things same day and thank gosh! The stories are numerous and oh so timely. Follow along as I attempt to recap our first full day on the show floor.
As he describes it: Cisco has developed and introduced Prime Assurance Manager with one essential goal in mind – to provide end-to-end operational monitoring visibility, spanning data center to and through the branch, as a means for facilitating efficient operations and proactively protecting network-delivered applications and network availability, network performance, application performance, and end user experience data across both wired and wireless environments, coupled with troubleshooting and reporting features.
In my first blog I described how Cisco IT is interconnecting our outsourced Contact Centers using SIP trunks, replacing the more costly (and less effective) PSTN trunks. In our first round of SIP trunk deployments we expect to save almost 25% of our current contact center calling costs (or $2M per year). But there were other, less tangible benefits as well. Read More »
Cisco has partnered with several outsourced vendors over the years for initial handling of many front-line calls and general information inquiries. Connecting these vendor environments into a single Cisco customer contact environment is critical for good customer care, but costly and not always easy. However, early this year we made a change: we’re using SIP trunking and Cisco Unified Border Element to bring us much closer together, and save money into the bargain.
Like many large enterprises, Cisco makes a lot of phone calls. Cisco previously used a lot of TDM trunks from multiple carriers to carry thousands of voice calls from our North American Cisco offices to the PSTN. The problem is, we had over 100 TDM trunks we were paying for every month, to carry our voice calls for these sites. Four years ago we started looking around for a more cost-effective and manageable way to support all these calls. After a good deal of searching, screening vendors and testing, we finally found it, using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking technology.
For the Cisco campuses in San Jose and Research Triangle Park (RTP), we will replace over a hundred PRI (23 channel) TDM trunks, used for long-distance voice calls for all of our North American sites, with SIP trunks. The new San Jose link is a 250 Mbps SIP trunk carved out of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN access line, while the RTP link is a 20 Mbps SIP trunk carved out of a 45 Mbps DS3 WAN access line. Together, these SIP trunks give us the capacity to carry over 2400 concurrent calls and a total voice call volume of 2 million minutes per month. Read More »
