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While the world of cloud communications and hosted services develops rapidly on a global scale, it is easy for industry players to feel as though they have to play catch up. Yet some organizations do possess the foresight to make upgrades and improvements to their solutions before the train leaves the station.

One such company is Clarus Systems (News - Alert), a provider of VoIP management and monitoring services. At ITEXPO East 2012 in Miami last week, I got the chance to sit down with Clarus’ Senior Vice President of Product Development, Gurmeet Lamba (News - Alert). He shed some light on where the company took its software and services in 2011, and where it sees the marketing going in the coming months and years.

Clarus added support for Cisco (News - Alert) tablets in the enterprise last year – a smart move considering the growing notion of the “consumerization of IT” as some put it. Lamba told me, “These consumer-based devices are entering the workforce. Just because it’s a tablet or a phone does not mean that users are going to have lower expectations on reliability and liability of the device. So we are in the business of ensuring extremely high service availability and service performance of all enterprise communications devices.”

The company is also a well-known provider of management and monitoring services for telepresence with some unique features to its solutions that have enabled it to make significant headway in the telepresence market.

“Our approach is end-user focused with a relentless effort towards service availability and service performance,” noted Lamba. “We get a combination of proactive automated testing combined with performance monitoring and predictive analytics. Proactive testing so that, before a user finds a problem, we find it. Performance monitoring enables us to keep an eye on voice quality, radio quality, security, and performance indicators. Predictive analytics combines all the data that we collect and mine to ensure any upcoming service issues can be addressed in advance. All this with no agents and no probes required.”

Sounds pretty efficient to us. As the services are built from the “bottom up” for unified communications, users are assured that Clarus’ technology has not been adapted for UC, but rather is originally intended for UC operations.

In looking towards the future, Lamba mused on the subject of the cloud. He mentioned that while cloud communications simplifies things for the end-user, it creates issues for those providing real-time communications technology. With hindrances including infrastructure complexity, a decrease of visibility in the infrastructure, and complex service requirements, Clarus actively works to address these challenges using its proactive testing approach.

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Chris DiMarco