As Cisco announces the end of life for Prime Collaboration Assurance & Analytics (PCA), many customers may be wondering, “What’s next?” While the product will be supported into October 2024, it will no longer be sold as of October 2021. That could leave some potential customers in the dark about what’s going on in their collaboration environments.
Cisco PCA has long been a necessary service to effectively manage voice and video quality for Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence, and the network infrastructure. But what does the end of life of Cisco PCA mean for customers, the market, and the kinds of technologies UC teams will need going forward?
Vyopta CTO and Co-founder Rick Leung spoke with UC Today and provided some insights into the market shifts that caused this decision, as well as details on the Cisco-recommended replacement solution from Vyopta.
Changes in the Market
As more companies move to the cloud for their UC needs, Leung cited a drastic shift in the market that Cisco historically served with PCA. These were primarily organisations with on-premises, Cisco-centric voice infrastructures.
As recent world events have highlighted, there has been rapid adoption of UCaaS technologies to respond to the pandemic. While we expect to continue to see this migration to UCaaS across many verticals, there are some sectors that will continue to use on-premises voice infrastructure. While this portion of the market may have not been enough to keep Cisco in the monitoring and analytics game with PCA, there is still a need for these customers to gain insights into their UC infrastructures.
This shift in UCaaS has also resulted in more complex UC environments which may include multiple technologies that need to be monitored as well, and the last thing that strapped IT and UC teams need to do is become an expert in multiple technologies.
Leung discussed the need for a single pane of glass across the technologies these teams are responsible for.
“Simplicity is really important for these overburdened UC and IT teams, and they need a monitoring and analytics solution that supports any of their use cases whether that is on-premises or cloud or hard phones, shared phones, or softphones. More than just monitoring these technologies, they need insights that will help them along the way. That’s where Vyopta can help”
What is Vyopta Offering as a PCA Replacement?
By supporting on-premises and legacy technologies, Vyopta is a readymade solution for monitoring and analytics that helps improve operational efficiency and quality of experience for the users.
Whether UC capabilities are based in the cloud or on-premises equipment, Vyopta offers:
- Inventory Management – Single-pane across all UC platforms (cloud, on-premises), endpoints and phones
- Health and Performance Monitoring – Multi-vendor monitoring; uptime, performance and quality across voice, video, meetings
- Experience Monitoring – Industry leading call experience algorithm and custom alerts to ensure VIP and high-level executives have the best possible call quality
- Technology Adoption – Track usage by technology, users and/or groups
- Asset & Capacity Planning – Plan for future with usage analytics across infrastructure/endpoints
“While information on a single event might be interesting, looking at integrated analytical insights based on patterns and trends can help these teams discover if there are systemic issues that need to be addressed,” said Leung.
For more information about Vyopta’s replacement for Cisco PCA including special pricing, visit www.vyopta.com/cisco-pca-eol or contact one of our Cisco Migration Specialists.
