Brian Jeffries is a vice president of operations on Cisco's Global Business Services team.  Working collectively with his colleagues across Cisco, he is responsible for increasing the speed and scale of end-to-end operational performance, driving efficiency and effectiveness, and simplifying the operational experience for our customers, partners, and sales field.  His key areas of focus include software simplification, customer relationship management, pricing optimization, and business architecture and policy.  Part of the software simplification effort is redesigning the Software Licensing Portal, an important step that will have a positive impact on our customers' and partners' ability to easily view and manage their licenses today.

I've asked Brian to join us to share details on the redesign, and to field any questions about the Registration Portal, or about Cisco's larger transformation of the licensing experience. Be sure to submit any questions to the team via the Licensing Registration Portal forum on the Cisco Support Community.

 By Guest Author Brian Jeffries

While we're making continual improvements to the software licensing experience with Cisco, we know that our customers still feel plenty of pain throughout the licensing processes.  We've made it a top priority  -and a long-term commitment -to simplify this experience and better help our customers manage their licensing.Our specific goals are to:

• Standardize licensing processes, policies and technologies for all Cisco software products
• Streamline the end-to-end software lifecycle from quote-to-activation-to-upgrade
• Provide visibility to a comprehensive source of truth for our customers' software install base

The release of the newly designed portal provides:

• A simplified user interface look and feel to maximize efficiency and improved speed and performance.
• More intuitive navigation to the most commonly used features in one centralized location.
• The first step to a future capability, managing PAKs, Devices, and License Transactions at the organization level.  Smart Accounts will offer users access to all license data in their company rather than only licenses registered under their CCO user ID.

Here's what the new Licensing Registration Portal will look like:

You can also take the full tour by watching this short, 3-minute video.

The redesigned portal should make it simpler to manage your licenses with Cisco today. If you have feedback about the new portal, please visit the Licensing Registration Portal forum on the Cisco Support Community.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Brian