Notice:
Due to signed NDA, some confidential information must be omitted and obfuscated. The information in the case study does not necessarily reflect the views of this project. Nevertheless, please do not download and share any details with external parties! Thank you.
Date: Novmber, 2015 - June, 2016
My Role: UI/UX Designer
Team Members
Design:
Brian Sarbin - Architecture/UX Design
Chenxi Jin - UX/UI Design
Min Chu - UX/UI Design
Development:
Joe Sutton - UX Engineering lead/Architecture/Development
Michael Hart - Development
Steven Bui - Development
Aurimas Songaila - Development
Emile Kratiroff - Development
Background
vBranch is a distributed service design extension of CloudVPN services. It is a generic branch deployment application to onboard network and branch services for enterprise customers.
vBranch targets two main scenarios: a managed provider scenario where service design and monitoring are completed by a managed service provider and customers define their network structure, and an enterprise scenario where service design, definition, and monitoring is managed by a single enterprise customer.
In the managed service scenario, the roles and functions of various parts of the network will be distributed across two products: an operator portal and a customer portal.
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The operator portal will have visibility across all customers and can monitor & troubleshoot issues when they arise. The primary purpose of this portal is to ensure that the infrastructure is meeting SLA's defined with customers, new services are implemented, and ensure customers are able to make service change requests.
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The customer portal is used primarily to ensure that purchased services are running within SLA limits and to define any changes that are made to the network, such as adding additional sites or modifying the service profiles running at sites.
For the enterprise scenario, it is assumed that the end-user will use the operator portal, but it is unclear if the customer portal will be relevant.
Goal
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Keep things simple.
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Guide user for best-practices.
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Reduce the complexity of managing 1,000's of objects.
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Provide clear information regarding how the SLA's are being met across sites, services, and site types.
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Demo/Mockups
Operational site view including the service metrics, template, resource view and automated activity feed.
Result and Impact
The team set out to drastically simplify the deployment experience by listening to customer needs with a critical ear and challenging traditional assumptions. The result is a powerful, yet simple and familiar experience that can be used to manage any branch network faster, with fewer errors and cheaper than ever before. Below are some of the simplifications that distinguish vBranch from other deployment tools:
Business Service Templates - In vBranch, services are more than equipment with config slapped on top. They are the business result networkers want to enable at branch sites. These services are grouped into templates which include the physical and virtual equipment, branch topology, and (the real differentiator) the configuration to enable these services organized by business feature. E.g. local Internet breakout would traditionally require 2 configs, one for a router and one for a firewall. With the business service template approach, these are combined into a single business service.
Services-first approach - Instead of requiring customers to “just know” which box to buy (I.e. spend days trying to understand Cisco’s complex hardware-to-service product matrix), the service-first approach makes it super simple for customers to deliver branch services by first asking what they are trying to do, and then showing them which technologies meet those requirements. Customers can get their jobs done faster and focus on networking because they no longer need to be Cisco product catalog guru’s.
More than virtual services - vBranch has been designed to help customers migrate to virtual environments by supporting existing brownfield, physical needs. Additionally, customers can enable the same set of services across multiple deployment types: virtual on-premise, virtual cloud, physical or hybrid. Also make sure to read up on how vBranch enables new ways to configure WAN services.
Do just one thing, but it really freaking well–And that one thing is deploying services to branch sites. We made a conscious effort to focus the UI and workflows on making it as easy as possible to deploy services, audit changes and embed approval workflows.
Dark Theme Mockups
