Smart Accounts Overview

Cisco Smart Accounts enable you to manage license assets on your own. Through your Smart Account, you can view and control access to all of your Cisco software licenses and entitlements across your organization. Before Smart Accounts, visibility to entitlements required individual Cisco.com identification, which restricted license management and reporting capabilities. Smart accounts offer the ability for customers, partners, and Cisco to share a common view of hardware, software entitlements, and services in the Cisco Smart Software Manager interface. In that space, all Smart Software Licensed products, upon configuration and activation with a single token, will self-register, removing the need to go to a website and register products with PAKs. Instead of using PAKs, your company can manage a pool of software licenses or entitlements in a flexible and automated manner. Your customers can self-manage license deployments easily and quickly in the Smart Software Manager.

 

Types

  1.  End Customer Smart Account: A Customer Smart Account identifies the customer for whom this order is being placed. End Customer Smart Accounts help customers view, manage, and use entitlements they have purchased. The creation of your End Customer Smart Account is a onetime setup activity
  2. Virtual Account: A subset of a Smart Account that a customer can use to organize licenses. For example, if “BigU.edu” is a customer’s umbrella Smart Account, they can also create “BigU.edu Physics Department,” a virtual account where they can deposit all licenses pertaining to BigU’s Physics Department. When you create a Smart Account, a corresponding default virtual account is automatically created at the same time.
  3. Holding Smart Account: A Holding Smart Account allows Partners to temporarily store unassigned orders until they can be assigned to an identified Customer Smart Account. Partners must assign a Customer Smart Account to products and services before the customer will be able to access and use those entitlements.
  4. Partner Smart Account: A Partner Smart Account identifies the Partner for whom this order is being placed. Partner Smart Accounts help Partners view, manage and use Partner Branded Service entitlements they have purchased.
    1. Partner Smart Account can be assigned only to request line(s) where service level Entitlement Party is Bill-to (PSS).

 

Roles

  1. Smart Account Administrator: This user type can view and manage license inventory for the entire Smart Account and perform account management activities. This user can edit account properties, add, edit, or delete virtual accounts, add, edit, or delete users, and accept the Smart Licensing Agreement.
  2. Virtual Account Administrator: This user type can view and manage licenses only in specific virtual accounts for which the Smart Account administrator has granted them access.
  3. Smart Account User: This user type can view and manage license inventory for the entire Smart Account.
  4. Virtual Account User: This user type can view and manage license inventory for assigned virtual account(s).