The Cisco Prime suite has been a valuable set of tools for IT professionals managing on-prem UC platforms.
But as more businesses start their journey to the cloud, Cisco is phasing out the Prime portfolio.
Here are some of the key dates to watch out for:
- 15 April 2021: End of life announcement
- 14 October 2021: End of sale
- 14 October 2022: End of software maintenance, meaning Cisco will not release patches
- 10 January 2024: The last date to extend or renew service contracts
- 31 October: 2024: All support will end, and the portfolio will become obsolete
Including in this phase-out is Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning (CPCP), which has given UC teams a platform for handling MACDs for on-prem Cisco platforms. Cisco is not replacing CPCP, meaning businesses will need to look for a third-party option.
Glenn Quesenberry, Global Partner Relationship Manager at Akkadian Labs, said that businesses should take CPCP’s end of life as an opportunity to move to a better product. CPCP has never been the most user-friendly product and only supports Cisco’s on-premises platforms – notably, not Webex.
“Businesses need to look for an alternative with some key features,” Quesenberry said.
“They need something that provides a unified workflow across different UC applications and multiple servers and clusters.”
“They need a platform that will help simplify their day-to-day MACDs, and they need it to be roles-based so they can delegate tasks to operations teams and free up higher-paid engineers.”
Automation is key to tying all these features together, along with others such as reporting and self-service tools.
Akkadian Provisioning Manager has automation at its heart through native integrations with Active Directory and ServiceNow. For example, this means that users can kick off on-boarding and off-boarding automatically.
Road to the Cloud
An essential feature of third-party alternatives to CPCP is that companies can use them to provision users on cloud-based platforms, but more important than this is the ability to provision users in more than one cloud UC solution.
