When we renovated our kitchen, one of our top priorities was upgrading to gas appliances. The first step was to have the gas company determine if our current gas line could handle the extra load of a restaurant-grade range.

The same pre-implementation assessment is highly recommended, if not required, before adding a bandwidth-intensive product to a network.  Let's use Cisco TelePresence as an example. 

You bring a customer to a live TelePresence session. They are wowed. They immediately see the benefits of a face-to-face meeting, and they are sold on how the TelePresence investment can pay for itself in a short period of time with the elimination of travel expenses alone.

They are ready! But is their network?

As your customer's partner and trusted advisor, it's your job to find out. An assessment of their network helps you mitigate risk by determining quickly what upgrades are required to ensure a successful implementation. It also helps you customize the solution by adding features and functionality that can help your customer-customization that might not have been identified without an analysis.

On the flip side, an assessment takes time. It costs money. It requires people, travel, and expertise. These things add up and can quickly eat into your profits.

Presidio Networks, however, found a way to accelerate the process.

"Our customers depend on us to help align their technology investments to their business goals.  CPS gives us access to the industry's leading best practices and benchmarks, so we can lead the conversation with our customers and validate our recommendations and designs with Cisco.  The credibility of this intellectual capital means our customers are confident that they are getting the best solutions to meet their objectives and that their relationship with Presidio and Cisco translates to a successful business outcome," says Bob Cagnazzi, CEO

 Instead of sending four employees to customer sites, Presidio now sends four to five laptops and thumb drives. One person onsite at Presidio analyzes the data remotely. As a result, instead of the assessment taking four days, it's done in just four hours. You can guess how that is accelerating the firm's sales cycle.

And the subsequent report is automated, it's deep, and it's authenticated. Presidio is notified if the customer's network has "passed" or "failed" with a report that is accompanied by graphs, charts, and a detailed explanation behind the conclusion. The assessment pinpoints the exact problems in the network, making Presidio's recommendations faster, more accurate, and more detailed.

How did Presidio accomplish this? It was easy with the Cisco Video Service Level Agreement Assessment Service through Collaborative Professional Services.  

This Service helps you assess a customer's network readiness for Cisco TelePresence through an automated process that analyzes real video and audio traffic streams. Partners have reported the Service has eased the burden on engineers, increased the quality of TelePresence deployments, and even lowered costs.

And it just got better.

Cisco recently added even more options (read the latest release notes) for assessment, development, and guidance services that can ease the burden and mitigate your risk during TelePresence deployments. These project-based services give you an advantage with options such as remote planning design assistance with knowledge transfer, remote design validation, and wider spread assessment services.

Can it get even better? Yes it can.

These new assessment, development, and guidance services are now offered with each of our architectures: Borderless Networks, Collaboration,andData Center.

The options to assess, build, and accelerate your professional services practice are endless. Let Collaborative Professional Services help.