Catalyst Center Review
February 25, 2025
Catalyst Center Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Center
We use the product to provide assurance information for our services, for services that we consume internally, our corporate services, but also services that we sell to our customers, either hardwired or wired. We leverage it to perform a lot of our configuration, which helps us provide those services, be it wired or wireless, and we use it for most aspects of our wide and wireless network change.
Pros
- That's a good one. Because its power is only exceeded by its mystery, it makes our life easy. Prior to having Cisco Catalyst Center in place, a simple change, a simple change to put a network out into service, each of a building might have taken hours or days worth of change planning. Now it takes us longer to raise the paperwork, run it, and go through a change board process and it does to execute the intent and turn it into an actionable service.
Cons
- Granularity. And so for us, and our use case might not be the same as a majority of customers, but we have a environment which frequently changes. So we're not a traditional corporate environment which stays relatively static or still reprovision. We want to reconfigure our environment to meet whatever the needs of our customers are. And at the moment it's like for some of the ways that we have to configure it, we just want to give something a little tap, but we have to hit it with a sledgehammer, which then often has knock on impacts other services.
- Short planning cycles is certainly one thing. I could say all the above, that'd be an easy answer, but I think where it's probably had a greatest impact to our organization is in the assurance capability. So when we sell services to customers, hardwired or wired, the fact that we can now 9 times out of 10 provide them evidence that they have had a service that they've paid for through the assurance side of things, that's been a game changer that because it's us providing firm evidence to them that we have provide everything they want, but they might not have asked for the collecting.
We went with Cisco Catalyst Center, we evaluated, I think it was called Rainbow from Altel, Lucent Enterprise because we were an Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise customer. But since we seeded with Cisco DNA Center and SD Access back in 2019, we haven't been out to evaluate anything which is a direct competitor. There are tools which we are looking to purchase and implement to provide functionality which Cisco Catalyst Center can't, but they're more value add tools, not to necessarily directly drive the capability of our infrastructure.
Do you think Cisco Catalyst Center delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst Center's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Catalyst Center live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Center go as expected?
No
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Center again?
Yes
Comments
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