Category Archives: Solutions

View our award winning products and solutions portfolio. We offer competitive pricing on many of today’s industry leading platforms including solutions from Cisco Systems, VMware, Microsoft, and EMC.

In addition we can also offer telephony services including SIP Trunking provided by nexVortex as well as Plantronics solutions for office phone systems.

Contact one of our sales staff today to get started!

Catalyst 3750-X Switches

Written on February 16, 2011 in Infrastructure
3750-X Photo

Lets face the facts, the very heart and soul of any IT shop is a switch right?

All of our devices from PC’s to Laptops, IP Phones to Wireless Access Points plug into these devices for connectivity to the network.

Did you know that now there are 3 Power over Ethernet or PoE standards?

Is your switch infrastructure ready to delivery 30 watts per PoE enabled port to power the new generation of IP Phones and Access Points?

One of 3750-X StackPowerthe features that we here at Hannah Technologies are simply in love with on the new 3750-X switches is a feature called “StackPower” which allows the switch stack to provide or share power across all members thus providing your organization redundancy if a power supply failure arises.

View a video presentation of StackPower in action, it may just shock you ( no pun intended ).

 

Key Benefits of the 3750-X Platform:

 

Enhance productivity by enabling applications such as IP telephony, wireless, and video for a borderless network experience. Cisco Catalyst 3750-X Series Switches are enterprise-class stackable switches. They provide high availability, scalability, security, energy efficiency, and ease of operation with innovative features such as Cisco StackPower, Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+), optional network modules, redundant power supplies, and MAC security.

Connectivity Options:

  • 24 and 48 10/100/1000 PoE+ and non-PoE models
  • PoE+ with 30W power on all ports in 1 rack unit (RU)
  • Optional four 1 Gb Ethernet SFP (Small Form-Factor Pluggable) or two 10 Gb Ethernet SFP+ uplink network module

High Availability Options

  • Cisco StackPower: Innovative, industry-first feature for sharing power among stack members
  • Cisco StackWise Plus for ease of use and resiliency with 64 Gbps throughput
  • Dual redundant, modular power supplies and fans

Investment Protection

  • Backward compatibility with Catalyst 3750 Series
  • Enhanced limited lifetime warranty
  • Cisco EnergyWise: Measure, report, and reduce energy usage

These features listed above are just a few of the great new items offered in this amazing switch.  We are also including a few links below for further reading, feel free to contact us today for further information or a demo of this truly innovative switch.


3750-X Switches Additional Reading and Case Studies

Whitepaper 1: StackPower Whitepaper

Whitepaper 2: Borderless Networks Whitepaper

Whitepaper 3: 3750-X Green Initiatives Whitepaper

Switch Family: Catalyst Family Product Brochure

Tech Specs: 3750-X Data Sheets

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The Future of Collaboration Technologies

Written on February 5, 2011 in Collaboration

How is your organization embracing or “cough” not embarrassing collaboration technologies?

At Hannah Technologies we have a simple motto regarding collaboration and collaboration tools, if it can help us more efficiently perform our daily tasks, we use it!

A great example of this is WebEx. We utilize WebEx technologies to allow us to connect and work with our vendors, customers, and partners efficiently over the web and often in the comfort of our own home. There is no need to take those long plane rides, which reduces travel costs, operating budgets, and provides near real time support.

Collaboration has become a buzz word as of late, everyone is talking about it, but few have mastered the technology to effectively scale and deploy it. The main goal is to transform the desktop into a collaborative workspace that can be accessible everywhere. Technologies such as VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure will be the hot technologies in the next few years. Cius tablets anyone? Video phones, Video that is search-able? New Telepresence endpoints, we got you covered!

What’s the big deal with Collaboration?

Cisco Collaboration solutions can help you tackle today’s business challenges and build competitive advantage.

Using Cisco’s open, interoperable architectural approach, you can flexibly integrate existing and new collaboration technologies on premises, in the cloud, or both, depending on your needs. The benefits of this open architecture include; transforming business interactions with real-time voice and video communications, quickly forming dynamic teams to make better decisions, faster, regardless of location, increasing customer responsiveness with instant
access to company experts, and securely connecting, communicating, and collaborating across traditional corporate boundaries.

Hannah Technologies can provide a wide range of collaboration tools, technologies, and consulting expertise to help you determine the “right mix” of technology and training to improve your collaboration efforts in your organization today.

Collaboration Technology Categories

Cisco has multiple categories of collaboration products available including the following;

  1. Conferencing Solutions – every organization at some point will have the need to perform conference calls, what few realize is just how critical this can be to everyday business functions.   There are several products including MeetingPlace Express, WebEx, and WebEx Connect which can assist with this task.  These tools provide you with advanced audio, web, and video conferencing solutions.
  2. Customer Care – Create a foundation for positive customer service from simple phone transactions to unique, rich experiences that can be customized to meet the needs of individual customers.  Customer Care can include solutions such as Unified Contact Center Express.  Allow your agents to connect to organization subject matter experts with Cisco Presence integration for better customer support, Agents can handle email, social media, outbound and inbound calls.
  3. Enterprise Social Software -Bring together people, communities, and relevant information in ways that deliver a new era of business productivity, innovation, and growth.  Cisco Show and Share provides a “Corporate Youtube” to allow your organization to securely and privately maintain a information portal supplying video training, corporate updates, and meeting presentations in HD video.
  4. IP Communications – Provide reliable and advanced communications capabilities no matter where staff may be working with a full suite of applications and endpoints.  Teleworkers will continue to be on the rise according to many industry reports, why not be ahead of the curve with advanced firewall solutions including Cisco Phone Proxy?
  5. Messaging -See who’s available, and connect with contacts through email, instant messaging, and voicemail.  Communicate within and between companies using presence, enterprise IM, and voicemail. Evolve messaging with secure hosted email or unified messaging that delivers a bridge to next-generation, web-based collaboration.
  6. Mobile Applications – Take your desktop with you anywhere you can use your phone.  Increase mobile employee productivity and responsiveness to customers by making mobile devices extensions of the collaboration experience.
  7. Telepresence – Transform your organization with face-to-face collaboration.  Take advantage of many rich, face-to-face experiences that invigorate business processes and create true customer intimacy.

Collaboration Additional Reading and Case Studies

Overview: Cisco Collaboration Overview

Experience: Cisco New Collaboration Experience

Transformation: Cisco Collaboration Transformation

ROI: Cisco Collaboration ROI

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Unified Contact Center Express 8.5

Written on February 1, 2011 in Contact Center

Unified Contact Center Express 8.5

Think your organization is ready for a IP based Contact Center?  Or do you currently have a contact center that isn’t quite living up to the hype?  If there is one area of Cisco UC which we can claim dominance against the “other guys” it would be UCCX.

Our engineers have years of real world, hands on UCCX experience.  We also teach UCCX courses for Cisco approved training partners all around the United States and abroad!

What is UCCX?

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 8.5 is Cisco’s IP based Contact Center product aimed at mid-market and branch-offices or departmental companies that need easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use, secure, virtual, highly available, and sophisticated customer interaction management for up to 400 agents.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express provides support for powerful, agent-based service as well as fully integrated self-service applications.  Traditionally IP Contact Centers have provided Interactive Voice Response or IVR capabilities, call routing to agents, Agent based client application for controlling agent state and 3rd party phone control, as well as powerful reporting, recording, and “screen popping” or passing data from the IVR to the agent.  These powerful resources result in reduced business costs and improved customer response.

UCCX 8.5 Components and Architecture

UCCX 8.5 provides an on box sophisticated and distributed automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), and agent and desktop services in a single-server.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express helps ensure your business rules for inbound and outbound voice and email; and customer interaction management helps ensure that each contact is delivered to the right agent the first time.

To help companies provide efficient, effective, customer-focused service in the contact center, supervisors must have the tools they need to manage team performance. Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express helps supervisors and other managers align contact center performance with business objectives by integrating workforce optimization into the team’s daily workflow.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is provided in three versions: Standard, Enhanced, and Premium, to better match product functions with your customer contact interaction management requirements. All Cisco Unified Contact Center Express products are tightly integrated with Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

Unlike many competitive products, Unified Contact Center Express does not require purchase of additional IVR services, but rather provides an integrated, ready-to-use IVR solution. Every package provides an IVR queue point, custom call treatment, arbitrarily deep voice menus, custom voice prompts, and the ability to process customer phone-keypad presses through dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) processing to make routing decisions or to present a screen pop to the agent.

Unified Contact Center Express Premium adds the ability to have true, sophisticated, and fully automated self-service applications integrated with your agent-assisted contact interaction management. This critical feature enables significant cost reduction on a per-contact basis and provides significant flexibility in handling customer contacts.

New Features in UCCX 8.5

  • Unified Presence Integration with CUPS and CUPC for SME to Agent communications
  • Microsoft CRM integration
  • Social Media Customer Care
  • Video integration for Video based SME’s

UCCX Additional Reading and Case Studies

Case Study 1: Hospital Improves Caller Experience and Increases Efficiency

Tech Specs: UCCX Data Sheets

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Virtualization with Cisco and VMware

Written on January 18, 2011 in Data Center, VMware
Cisco UCS B Series Chassis

Is your organization thinking about virtualization, perhaps on the Cisco C or B Series Unified Computing System? The decision to consolidate and virtualize and environment should not be taken lightly, there are multiple factors that need to be addressed. However, the benefits far exceed the capital expenditures.

Virtualization on the UCS allows you to treat IT as a service, if a department wants a new “sandbox”, imagine being able to provide a web page for users to provision their own sandbox environment for application development and testing. Sound appealing? Also, imagine being able to patch and test updates to applications and operating systems without worry of failures, this is easily accomplished in a virtualized environment with VMware and Cisco UCS.

 

 

Today, more than 70 percent of IT budget is spent simply to maintain and manage existing infrastructure (Source: Forrester, December 2008).

The result: IT organizations must continually increase resources to maintain a growing, complex, and inflexible infrastructure versus using them to rapidly and effectively respond to business needs.

IT organizations are working with their business counterparts to identify ways to substantially decrease cost of ownership while increasing IT business value.  Imagine the cost involved with running racks of equipment in a data center per day, per month, or even per year!  The cooling, power conditioning, and security alone is often costly.

The Cisco Unified Computing System helps address these challenges by streamlining data center resources, scaling service delivery, and radically reducing the number of devices requiring setup, management, power/cooling, and cabling.

The Cisco Unified Computing System can deliver these benefits through:

  • Reducing total cost of ownership at the platform, site, and organizational levels
  • Increasing IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments
  • Enabling scalability through a design for up to 320 discrete servers and thousands of virtual machines in a single highly available management domain
  • Using industry standards supported by a partner ecosystem of innovative, trusted industry leaders

The Cisco Unified Computing System represents a radical simplification of traditional architectures, dramatically reducing the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured. The solution delivers end-to-end optimization for virtualized environments while retaining the ability to support traditional OS and application stacks in physical environments.

The solution delivers end-to-end optimization for virtualized environments.

The system helps to reduce total cost of ownership by automating element-management tasks through the use of service profiles that enable just-in-time provisioning. Service profiles increase business agility by quickly aligning computing resources with rapidly changing business and workload requirements.

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Unified Communications Manager 8.5

Written on January 2, 2011 in Unified Communications

Why CUCM 8.5?

Everywhere we travel, we often are asked “What’s the big deal with Cisco Unified Communications Manager?”, formerly known as Cisco Call Manager.

Well “the deal” is very big! CUCM is Cisco’s IP based PBX. It has achieved several industry leading certifications and is certified for PBX1 deployment by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC).

CUCM provides agencies with a scalable, distributable, and highly available communications platform, giving users the power to manage their communications quickly and conveniently, so they have more time to manage their work and focus on mission-critical tasks.

CUCM Architecture

CUCM 8.5 is at the very heart of the modern Cisco Unified Communications platform. CUCM provides several key features and functions to the UC environment including; call signaling, setup and tear down, billing, CDR or call detail records, native presence capabilities, rich media conferencing, robust third party application integration and a highly scalable and available platform providing 3rd party API access for custom application development.

With Cisco Unified Communications Manager, you get an enterprise-class IP telephony call-processing system for up to 30,000 users. It provides a centralized or distributed dial plan and architecture, multiple features, a built in back and restore agent, and directory integration into many modern LDAP structures.

Key Benefits:

  • Simplify voice systems with unified communications to cut costs and dramatically streamline provisioning and maintenance.
  • Extend video capabilities to your employees through a single, unified communications infrastructure.
  • Build productivity with comprehensive unified communications to help workers communicate and work more effectively.
  • Enable mobility with embedded unified mobility software capabilities to keep workers productive wherever they are.
  • Improve collaboration: click to begin an IM session, initiate a phone call, or easily start a videoconferencing call.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager creates a unified workspace that supports a full range of communications features and applications with a solution that is highly:

  1. Scalable: Support up to 30,000 users with each Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster.
  2. Distributable: Get scalability, redundancy, and load balancing.
  3. Available: Maintain business continuity and collaboration with a high-availability foundation for server redundancy.

CUCM Additional Reading and Case Studies

Case Study 1: CUCM 8.5 Multi-site Deployment Case Study

Tech Specs: CUCM 8.0 Data Sheets

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