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In all business relationships, it’s important to make sure that everything is running smoothly, but when your company deals with large system integrators whose end customers are worldwide financial firms, it is more than important; it’s vital.

Therefore, Cisco (News - Alert) Advanced Services takes great care when selecting the proper solutions to use for unified communications deployments. Its selection of UC Xpert from OPNET therefore serves as a ringing endorsement for the solution.

Recently, at the OPNETWORK 2012 event in Washington D.C., Steve Chacho from OPNET spoke with Jim Mihal, program management office and operations manager for Cisco Advanced Services about Cisco’s use of Unified Communications Xpert.

According to Mihal, UC Xpert is primarily used to complete what he calls “build milestone testing.”

Since the company has all of its gear in third-party remote data centers, what it is doing is using the UC Xpert software in its own headend and, using OPNET engineers, it is “running through a series of tests to essentially sanction the headend and the functionality that it’s providing to those end customers,” according to Mihal.

UC Xpert “does a great job of going end-to-end, through the network, seizing control of the phones on the other side, on the customer side of the network, and testing out the functionality.”

In addition to just testing out the functionality from the end-user perspective, Mihal points out that UC Xpert also tests “the underlying infrastructure to make sure that everything is working properly.” He said that the software has been very beneficial and has helped Cisco Advanced Services get over the line on many contracts.

UC Xpert provides end-to-end service management for Unified Communications (News - Alert), including Cisco IP Telephony and Telepresence during new deployments, upgrades and ongoing operations while maximizing performance and availability through automated proactive testing, performance monitoring, configuration management and business intelligence reporting.

To hear the full interview with Mihal, click here.

To find out more about OPNET Technologies (News - Alert), visit the company at ITEXPO West 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s largest communications and technology event. OPNET’s Vice President of R&D, Gurmeet Lamba, is speaking during “Migrating Your Apps to the Cloud: Planning and Key Considerations.” For more information on ITEXPO West 2012, click here.