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I had a chance to sit down with John McCaffrey, vice president of sales and professional services for Clarus Systems (News - Alert) at ITEXPO West 2011 last month in Austin, TX, and he shed some light on the latest developments from the company that works in the testing sector of the unified communications and VoIP management space.

Clarus Systems performs a wide range of services including automated testing, and performance management. McCaffrey noted that, “basically we’re trying to constantly detect whether or not there are any issues in the system, and get those issues fixed before they impact end-users.” But Clarus, like those who stay ahead of the industry, is looking towards what’s next. And what is next exactly? You guessed it. The cloud.

McCaffrey raised some concerns and some of the topics that were being discussed at the show. He told me that he was ruminating over, “The prospect of voice, unified communications, moving to the cloud, and some of the challenges that would represent to our customers, and to a company that’s in the business of measuring and monitoring quality of service.”

He asked the question that many quality management providers are these days: How do you trust that he cloud is going to be able to deliver a real-time service like voice and have the metrics and quality that you’ve come to count on if you have these systems internally?

Clarus is able to take an end-user’s phone and automatically use it to place calls as if the end-user is sitting there. This capability functions as a test, and the technology from Clarus allows it to test “thousands to tens-of-thousands of phones a night, and then produce metrics to show whether phones are available, whether call quality is good, or whether calls are going through as expected.”

In the last year, Clarus has been focused on analytics. McCaffrey noted that Clarus has been using analytics to better get a grasp on the large amounts of data it gleans from customers to forsee future problems for that customer. 

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 Jennifer Russell