Vyopta for Cisco Meeting Servers (CMS)

What do RioTinto, DellEMC, Novartis, Tiffany & Co., Comcast, and Stanford Health have in common? Besides being global enterprises who rely on video collaboration to power massive shifts to remote work in response to Covid-19, they also use Vyopta along with Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) to optimize enterprise collaboration.

If you’re a Cisco Meeting Server customer, then you know CMS brings premises-based video, audio, and web communication together to meet the collaboration needs of the modern workplace. What you might not know is that you can push the power of CMS even further with monitoring and analytics from Vyopta.

Why do you need Vyopta with Cisco Meeting Server?

For starters, companies need to know the health of their CMS deployments, and they need alerts to notify them of when systems go down as well as visibility into which systems are up or down at any given time. In addition, without some kind of visibility into Cisco Meeting Server capacity, enterprises risk running out of capacity which means CMS servers can crash and scheduled meetings won’t start due to capacity issues.  And if users happen to experience bad quality during their meeting, Cisco Meeting Server alone does not provide visibility into metrics for the meeting or participant to help troubleshoot root cause. Finally, if you’re in a situation where you are providing services where historical data on your meetings is important, such as a telemedicine provider or law firm, Cisco does not provide that data needed for adoption, utilization, and compliance reports.

Great, how does Vyopta help with quality of experience?

It’s not very productive to have IT teams living in Cisco Meeting Server. It’s far more efficient to be notified of when they need to log into a system to address an issue. Vyopta’s Collaboration Performance Management Monitoring (CPMM) solution shows Cisco Meeting Server up/down status on a visual dashboard as well as offering alerts can be set up to notify a user of when there is an issue. And when it comes to participant quality, Vyopta allows IT teams to quickly troubleshoot why a participant is having a bad experience or to rule out the Cisco Meeting Server platform as the issue. When users’ software clients and endpoints are registered to CMS, Vyopta can also gather performance metrics from the edge conference node or expressway, and the endpoint directly to better detect and diagnose quality issues.  Vyopta is also the only solution that provides dial-back capability so users can look back at historical data in Cisco Meeting Server to discover trends and patterns that indicate an issue.

Cool, but what are the business benefits?

By having better visibility into Cisco Meeting Server with Vyopta’s CPM Analytics, companies can keep their CMS bridges available so employees can continue to conduct business for internal and external meetings in a more efficient manner. They can see Cisco Meeting Server license and bridging capacity and understand peak concurrent usage to intelligently throttle  capacity to meet business needs and avoid service disruptions. Understanding the quality of meetings is also crucial to productivity and business continuity so knowing why a user had a bad experience and being able to rule things out makes the troubleshooting process quicker and easier to execute. Metrics related to adoption, utilization, and compliance also allow companies to understand how departments and geographic locations are engaging with collaboration differently and to better train users to have a successful experience. This way, business stakeholders can better understand employee engagement, a crucial metric during these Covid-19 remote work times. Lastly, Vyopta proactively notifies IT teams of potential disruptions, and allows them to troubleshoot not only live meetings, but also past meetings.

Sold, how do I give it a try?

Vyopta is providing a free extended trial of the CPM suite for Cisco Meeting Server customers through July 31, 2020. Act by May 31, 2020 to secure your trial.

Angela Shori is a business writer and technology marketer with over 20 years of experience. She holds an M. A. in Advertising from the University of Texas and writes about unified communications, cloud technology, innovation, and the future of work -- sometimes through the lens of Star Wars. You can find her online at LinkedIn and Twitter.