TMCnews Featured Article

 “The enterprise relies on communication services as the gasoline that powers the corporate engine.” How true these words are, especially for companies who rely on communications, monitoring and testing for their company’s livelihood. Gurmeet Lamba (News - Alert), SVP of Engineering at Clarus Systems, Inc. stressed the importance of VoIP management, IP telephony and unified communications for all enterprises to protect their revenue.

“Missing that one essential call – or not being able to make it – is a good way for a company to lose revenue,” said Lamba in the company’s press release regarding a recent webinar on IP telephony and unified communications.

Addressing top-level business service management issues and practices, the one-hour session was led by Lamba and David Roberts, Director of Product Management for Clarus Systems (News - Alert), Inc.

Clarus notes that while the complexity of operations has increased, service level agreement (SLA) expectations are the same or higher. Taking a service management approach incorporating BSM and ITIL with supporting management technology can help IT deliver cost- efficient services to help ensure SLAs are met. The webinar demonstrated how a service management framework can be implemented using Clarus IPC (News - Alert) Plus+ with its 4 pillars of management functionality: automated testing / diagnostics, performance monitoring, configuration management and business intelligence.

“IP telephony and unified communications are quite prevalent in today’s enterprise,” said Lamba during his opening words of the webinar.

Before jumping into any management technology, Lamba noted that companies should first assess what problems need solving, see if there are applicable industry standard frameworks and ask if the management technology choice is aligned. Then and only then can companies look at tools to manage a newly deployed IP telephony communications system.

Examples of common issues highlighted included availability, IT costs and customer service.

For availability, Lamba noted that downtime, capacity problems, voice quality issues and continuous migrations were on the list. As for IT costs, problems are too many disparate tools and deployment costs and scheduling, and for customer service, often there is no proactive detection and no visibility on issues.

Lamba begs the question, then, when it comes to solutions, why create new processes when you may already have best practices and standardized processes in existence?

Taking a service management approach incorporating BSM and ITIL with supporting management technology can help IT deliver cost efficient services to help ensure SLAs are met.

The Clarus Services team ensures success by leveraging highly developed problem isolation skills, extensive experience, proven methodologies and their Clarus Services FormulaClarusIPC Plus+ software solution. Having worked worked with some of the largest and complex VoIP networks in the world, Clarus hascertified over 5 million end points. 

ClarusIPC Plus+ provides end-to-end Voice over IP (VoIP) service management for Cisco Unified Communications (News - Alert) IP Telephony systems during new deployments, upgrades and ongoing operations.

Earlier this year, Clarus launched version 4.0 of its ClarusIPC Plus+. Designed with customer-proven algorithms, the latest version allows IT professionals to do more testing faster during new deployments, upgrades, or continuous regression testing, which is one of the important topics in Clarus’ recent webinar.

"With this release, we add support for the most widely deployed UC applications. We will continue to follow the lead of our customers and support additional UC apps, from Cisco (News - Alert) and others as they are deployed and implemented," said Lamba at the time of the launch.