Improving employee productivity is the goal for any business. Some methods are obvious but some are less known about but yield great results. This applies to Cisco Enterprise Agreements. If you’ve heard about this concept before you’ve likely heard about the huge financial savings they bring; our customers normally save 30-40% on their licensing bills.

However you probably don’t know about all the operational benefits that come with them. This article will take a look at five ways your staff will become more efficient after a Cisco Enterprise Agreement has been implemented.

A constant concern for those responsible for technology licensing is ensuring the business is in compliance. This can be an impossible task when they can have hundreds of different renewal dates a year! A large proportion of their time spent in the office simply revolves around checking when different technology becomes unlicensed. (We also recommend Acela to solve this specific issue).

Well with a Cisco Enterprise Agreement this task becomes immensely easier. One of the main advantages of the Cisco Enterprise Agreement is that all your licenses get collated into one single contract, therefore you only have one single renewal date every year and you will never be out of compliance. This is a huge time saver for employees who are normally responsible for this mammoth task and will improve their productivity in other, more important areas of their job. 

The graph below is from a report produced by an external body that reviewed the benefits of the Cisco Enterprise Agreement. As you can see, time spent on licensing related tasks after a Cisco Enterprise Agreement is a fraction of before. Full Report.

One of the most time-consuming tasks when it comes to managing your licensing is the time it takes to procure new licenses. Let’s say for example a new employee joins and needs access to a certain piece of software to complete their tasks. They have to talk to the IT department, who then talk to the procurement team, who then talk to their Cisco partner, who then talk to their account manager. This is an extremely lengthy process with plenty of potential bottlenecks. 

A Cisco Enterprise Agreement completely eradicates this problem. As soon as a new license is required, any employee with the right permissions can instantly generate a new license on the Enterprise Agreement dashboard. This saves a huge amount of time and means all the staff involved have one less interruption to their normal workflow, in turn boosting productivity. 

When it comes to large businesses who can have offices all around the globe, knowing what licenses you have is often a guessing game. Keeping track of everything that’s been bought is very difficult without strict procedures that often have not been implemented. 

When you are set up with a Cisco Enterprise Agreement through Tesrex, every license you own, in any of the different offices is all tracked and visible on the Cisco Enterprise Agreement portal. This means you have full visibility into what you have, who bought it, and importantly if it’s being used! This means you can streamline your Cisco portfolio and easily reallocate existing licenses to new pieces of hardware. This can save a lot of time and money. 

Similarly, to the last point, the ability to see what’s being used is also a fantastic way of gauging whether or not employees are adopting a new piece of technology or a new feature. 

Let’s say for example you deploy a fleet of new collaboration devices to boost company productivity. With the Cisco Enterprise Agreement, you can see which offices are making use of the products and which offices are not adopting the device correctly. From this, you may decide to schedule training in those offices who are not using it as they should be. This, in turn, will boost productivity like the devices were originally supposed to. 

Cisco is constantly releasing new platforms and software that will increase the efficiency of the employees that use them. However, not all products are appropriate for all businesses. For an IT manager, trying to determine which platforms would benefit them most can be tricky as a full-scale deployment is expensive and risky if it turns out that the project does not produce an ROI. 

With a Cisco Enterprise Agreement, you can seamlessly trial a new platform with a small user base without spending any money. If the platform helps to boost employee productivity, then great! You can roll it out to everyone in the organisation. If it doesn’t suit you then you can just stop using it and you never have to pay a penny! This is a great benefit of the Cisco Enterprise Agreement and allows IT managers to try before they buy when it comes to boosting productivity within their organisation. 

There are many ways that a Cisco Enterprise Agreement will improve your company productivity and this article just highlights a few. If you want to learn more about how this type of licensing could benefit your business, please reach out to us. At Tesrex, we pride ourselves on our Cisco Licensing expertise and we offer a free Cisco Licensing Review that will give you exact details of how much money you save by switching to an Enterprise Agreement.