Cisco Prime™ Active Catalog addresses the number one challenge for the new generation of communications service providers (CSPs): how do they turn themselves into agile, consumer-focused businesses, responsive to their customers and equipped to compete in an ever more complex and aggressive marketplace?
Cisco Prime Active Catalog helps by giving CSPs close control of their increasingly complex product and service environment. (See Figure 1.) It lets them build and adapt commercial products quickly from reusable service components, bringing new revenues through the door with minimal delay and allowing a fast response to competitors. Cisco Prime Active Catalog then orchestrates the delivery of those same complex products while minimizing errors, increasing customer satisfaction, and maximizing the revenue opportunity from innovative products.
Cisco Prime Active Catalog's design function allows the aggregation of capabilities into services, packages, and bundles, right up to customer-facing product level. Depending on the CSP's preferred architecture, these product definitions can then be published upwards, typically to customer relationship management (CRM) platforms or commercial product catalogs, or directly to customer portals for communication to the customer.
Cisco Prime Active Catalog's manufacturing function will take orders from any order capture function in the CSP architecture, decompose those orders into individual service components, and orchestrate their fulfillment across a number of activities and service platforms, such as service fulfillment engines, workflow engines, or service delivery platforms (SDPs).
Cisco Prime Active Catalog provides:
• Reduced development effort
• More efficient use of specialist expertise
• Reduced integration costs and customization costs
• Fewer points of failure in the delivery chain
• Faster time to market and quicker revenue
• Reduced customer churn
Figure 1. The Complex Next-Generation Service Ecosystem
Features and Benefits
Cisco Prime Active Catalog's collaborative environment acts as a vital enabler to business transformation, acting as a bridge across currently dispersed service silos and departments. It brings product lifecycle management (PLM) techniques such as computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and product data management (PDM) to telecoms to achieve industry-proven benefits.
• Product component reuse shortens the gap between product concept and revenue generation, minimizes wasted intellectual effort and maximizes contract value.
• Structured and orchestrated delivery helps minimize the delay between order and revenue generation and helps ensure consistency of delivery even across multiple service partners.
• Extensible platform encourages and supports innovation.
• Ease of development increases the number of products in the marketplace at any given time, maximizing the probable hit rate for new services.
• Quality of customer experience is improved through improved orchestration of service delivery, reducing churn, and improving market reputation.
• Combined service and product data extends the useful life of individual service platforms.
• Automated and standardized interfaces through the TeleManagement Forum (TMF)-endorsed Product and Service Assembly (PSA) standard make it easy to take on and work with partner capabilities.
Figure 2. Cisco Prime Active Catalog: Managing the Complex New-Generation Service Ecosystem
Summary
Next-generation telecom products will be complex; new-generation CSPs are building wide portfolios of products, which blend access, services, products, applications, and content. Simply maintaining an understanding of this fast-evolving environment is a real challenge for many carriers, particularly in the sales, marketing, and customer support functions.
Cisco Prime Active Catalog allows the complex new-generation service ecosystem to be more easily managed.
Further Information
About Cisco Prime
The Cisco Prime portfolio of enterprise and service provider management offerings empowers IT organizations to more effectively manage their networks and the services they deliver. Built on a service-centered foundation, the Cisco Prime portfolio of products supports integrated lifecycle management through an intuitive workflow-oriented user experience. The portfolio of Cisco Prime solutions for service providers provides A-to-Z management for IP next-generation networks, mobility, video, and managed services.
Service and Support
Cisco offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco® services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco services, see Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.
