Driving Simplicity and Convenience for our Customers and Partners

At Cisco, one of our guiding principles is simplicity and convenience for our customers and partners. We believe that seeking and ingraining feedback in the future design and roadmap is a key factor which enables us to continually improve our products and solutions to solve real customer issues. In that vein, we received important customer feedback in three critical areas.  Here is what you told us:

1. You want to see all of your purchases in a single view. Without full visibility into what you own and what you are using, your organization could fall prey to significant legal, financial and operational issues. Legal issues like software compliance and audits.  Financial issues such as over or under purchasing or ineffective contract negotiations.  And operational issues such as poor utilization of hardware and entitlements or expired service and support contracts.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to properly manage what you can’t see.
2. You need to be able to easily view and control who has access to service transactions and data. IT Administrators need to be able see and manage who has access to what, at any given time. Roles change, people move in and out of an organization, projects start and stop. Admins need instant access and control to generate or re-host licenses, manage user roles, and be able to quickly turn off access to critical network assets and entitlements when needed.
3. There are too many tools and processes, along with multiple, uncoordinated touch points.  Network infrastructures are getting more and more complex every day. With more tools, more portals, more subscriptions, more services, you need a solution that will consolidate all of the touch points and connect the dots for you.

Your feedback drove a new solution

My Cisco Entitlements (MCE) is a new, secure, user-friendly solution to manage assets and entitlements including technical support, software upgrades and downloads – all in one place, on one platform. MCE provides complete end-to-end IT infrastructure transparency. Building on the power of Cisco Smart Accounts, it brings visibility and control together on one platform that provides access to all Cisco services, subscriptions, licenses, and devices throughout their lifecycle.

No more portal hopping

With MCE you can now view everything in one place, instead of many. Real-time insights provide a forward view into products and services along with activation and utilization metrics.

A streamlined dashboard provides a customized view based on pre-selected filter choices. You can instantly obtain status on your systems and equipment, location of components, asset warranty, expiration dates, and more.

The flexible MCE platform provides the ability to:

• Filter, sort, export, tag and organize assets and entitlements
• Assign assets to Smart Accounts/Virtual Accounts
• Open a new support case
• Request software version upgrades on the fly

Providing insight into critical IT questions

IT managers and network administrators are confronted daily with questions that directly impact their organization’s investments. Questions like:

• Are we fully optimizing the utilization of our existing assets and entitlements?
• Do we need additional or fewer services, subscriptions, licenses, or devices?
• What is nearing expiration or approaching end of support?

MCE provides valuable and actionable insights and answers to these important questions. For instance, MCE can proactively identify what’s at risk and the changes required to optimize an organization’s investment to its maximum potential. Dashboards and filters show usage metrics as well as service and support contracts that are near expiration.  Additionally, an organization’s investments are protected with secure and consolidated user access management using MCE.

We’re not done yet.

In the future, MCE will offer self-service MACD (Moves, Adds, Changes, and Deletes) on assets and entitlements. It will be the unified entry point to access all of your Cisco products and services entitlements such as rehosting licenses, requesting an RMA, and registering products and services. Features such as device management APIs, customizable and actionable notifications and alerts, and legacy licensing capabilities will all be standard.

While this is a giant leap in the right direction, we are not done yet. We will continually strive to build upon the platform and deliver more value, insights and capabilities for our users. We appreciate the partnership and the straight talk with our customers and partners, which has enabled us to bring together this unique platform.

MCE delivers on our simplicity and convenience for customers and partners ethos and I look forward to sharing more in the future.

Stay tuned and be sure to visit www.cisco.com/go/mce  to learn more.