Cisco Smart Accounts are essentially containers where organisations can store and organise all their Cisco licenses and agreements into a fully transparent, easy to manage platform.

This article will be going over the benefits of Cisco Smart Accounts but we also recently published an explanation of what a Cisco Smart Account is, here.

There are many advantages that come with a Cisco Smart Account in relation to ease of management, productivity, visibility, control, compliance, and even financial savings. Here are a few ways that a Smart Account will help.

Similarly to an Asset Management Tool like Acela, with a Cisco Smart Account, you gain an invaluable level of visibility into your entire array of Cisco assets. You have a real-time view of exactly which license is assigned to which device and who is using it. This can translate into a whole host of other benefits that we will get to in a moment.

Without a Smart Account, IT Admins or License management teams are left playing a constant guessing game over what they have and haven’t got which quickly becomes a tedious process. This guessing game becomes completely redundant as soon as a Smart Account is deployed, and your team can devote their time to more worthwhile tasks.

As you can see in the image below, all activity is recorded so you can check who bought which licenses and when they expire.

Self-management is one of the most attractive features of a Cisco Smart Account. Customers with a Smart Account seem to love the ability to add or remove users easily, by themselves, without having to engage with their partner. This drastically reduces the time it takes to make changes based on your licensing needs. A Smart Account is a single location for both customers and partners to manage licensing in a secure and centralised way.

With Virtual accounts, customers also have greater control over their estate and who has access. By separating your assets in different virtual accounts and assigning access to certain people you can strictly enforce who can see which sections, completely by yourself!

The Smart Account portal also has options that you can configure so you are notified straight away about your chosen alerts.

Usage visibility is extremely valuable and Cisco Smart Accounts are great at providing this for you. This allows you to see exactly which licenses you own, and which are being used and how often. This is vital data that can be used when planning or preventing against over/under licensing.

It can also indicate areas of the business where certain available technologies are not being utilised. This could lead to some investigation where the IT team may discover that those users have never been trained properly to use the technology and are therefore less productive than their potential.

Smart Accounts allows you to check your compliance whenever you wish. Licensing becomes stressful when disorganised because the people responsible for managing it are never certain if their organisation is compliant or not. You also have complete visibility into renewal dates and whenever new purchases are made from your business.

Below is an example of the alerts page within your Cisco Smart Account where you can clearly see all the major items that need addressing and the minor issues where licenses have expired.

All these benefits feed into the goal of most businesses, to save on costs! The streamlined license management aspect, as mentioned earlier, frees up a significant amount of time for the people who are responsible for licensing. This means they get more tasks done within a day, in turn boosting the productivity of your firm.

The visibility aspect allows you to see when licenses aren’t being used. This means you can end these licenses, so you don’t have to continue paying for what you don’t need. In some cases, this has dramatically reduced annual bills. The ability to transfer licenses between different departments in the business also reduces the need to buy brand new licensing.

To save money, choose Cisco Smart Accounts.

Are you an existing Cisco Customer? We would really recommend you get started with Cisco Smart Accounts. The benefits are huge and there really is no catch! Plus, it’s very easy to get things going!

If you click here you can enter your email address and within one working day, a Cisco licensing expert from our team will contact you. He’ll answer any of your questions and if you think your ready to get started, that’s great!

We are a Cisco Licensing Specialist with years of experience in setting our clients up with a Cisco Smart Account and Enterprise Agreements. We have a customer-focused orientation and always strive to attain the most beneficial contracts for our clients. Click here to learn more about how we can transform your licensing and greatly reduce your licensing bills.