Get the Big Picture with My Cisco Entitlements

Co-authored by Lisa Morway, Enterprise Software Marketing, Cisco

Your network infrastructure is the engine that drives your business – growing more powerful and more complex every day.  More hardware, more software, more subscriptions and services, more moving parts. But how do you manage what you can’t see?

Getting full visibility into IT assets and entitlements is at the top of most IT admins’ priority lists.  However, we all know that tracking IT assets and entitlements can be a daunting, if not impossible task. The manual approach is error prone, expensive and doesn’t scale. It’s easy for organizations to fall down on manually tracking usage, entitlements, and renewals, which can result in under-utilization or over spending. Without full visibility into what you own and what you are using, your organization could face significant legal, financial and operational issues.

Nobody wants to be put in that kind of predicament – so what do you do? For starters, IT Administrators need full insight into what their organization owns and what it is using.

Introducing My Cisco Entitlements

To tackle this ongoing issue, we’ve developed My Cisco Entitlements, a secure, one-stop platform to manage all of your Cisco software, hardware, subscriptions and services from a single location.

My Cisco Entitlements (MCE) acts as a single pane of glass to view, manage and secure all Cisco asset and entitlements.  We’ve been piloting the program with nearly 300 customers since January and will be showcasing MCE at Cisco Live in San Diego next month.  Here are a few of the things you can expect to see:

View all – See all of your products, services and metrics

MCE provides a customizable dashboard that gives you critical information you need about your network hardware software, subscriptions, support and services at a glance.  You can view data by geography or architecture, in graphical or tabular modes and you can filter to drill down on the information you need.  Having full visibility and insights help to improve IT asset planning, budgeting and investment allocations. Pilot customers have told us that MCE is going to simplify how they manage their licenses and make their lives so much easier moving forward by having a single view.

Manage all – Track and control your licenses, devices, services and support

With MCE, all license types – Smart Licenses, traditional licenses, enterprise agreements and subscriptions – are visible in a single view.  The search and filter tools enable you to drill down on specifics so you can easily identify under- or over-used licenses, upcoming expirations and more.  Now you can control software spending through software licenses compliance and optimization.  You can also register products and services, generate or rehost licenses, download software and create support cases.  Yep, all in a single pane of glass.

Secure all – Manage user roles and access

With MCE, you control access to assets and entitlements with the use of Virtual Accounts and role assignments.  Now you can easily control who has access to what. If an employee leaves or moves to a different role, assets and entitlements are put back into the pool for reassignment – there is no need to retire or repurchase.  You can also ensure business continuity by identifying assets at risk (for example: assets at/near LDoS, aged/unsupported OS versions etc.). And identify subscriptions that are coming up for renewal so you can keep the business running smoothly and securely – no hiccups, no downtime.

My Cisco Entitlements is a secure, one-stop platform to manage all of your Cisco software, hardware, subscriptions and services.

Attending Cisco Live San Diego?

Come experience My Cisco Entitlements for yourself. We’ll have a demonstration in the Campus Area of the Cisco Showcase. Interested customers can get started with MCE at the show. And to learn more, register for session PSONWT-2010 on Monday at 1:00 PM.

Don’t want to wait that long?  Visit www.cisco.com/go/mce  to learn more and sign up to get started today!