IP telephony management software essential to large-scale deployments
July 6, 2008
By Shamus McGillicuddy, News Editor

The automated testing and management tools included in emerging IP telephony management software packages are essential to a complex IP telephony deployment. A manual approach in an enterprise deployment could lead to disaster...

At the Cisco Networkers Conference in Orlando Monday, unified communications provider Clarus Systems Inc. announced its new Migration Certification service. The program is aimed at getting ClarusIPC Plus customers ready for the migration to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 6.x.

Clarus processes are designed to benchmark and test a client's system from the end-users perspective to help improve operational readiness. This includes configuration analysis, firmware verification, automated testing, performance monitoring, and certification reporting.

Clarus Launches New Migration Certification Service
June 24, 2008
Raju Shanbhag

Seeking to reduce risk by verifying operational readiness and performance before, during and after migration, Clarus Systems, Inc., today announced that the company will be focusing on getting its ClarusIPC Plus+ customers “future-ready.”

Clarus Systems Inc. of Redwood Shores promoted Gurmeet Lamba to senior vice president, product development and hired Helen Robinson as director of product management. Robinson joins the unified communications company from Cisco Systems Inc. where she was a product manager.

Continuing with my Women in VoIP Series, I’d like to introduce you all to Helen Robison (in case you haven’t heard of her before, whom I’m sure you have!). Helen works as the Director of Product Development for Clarus Systems, Inc., and has been working in the telecommunications industry for over 20 years, VoIP for 10.

Clarus Selected as Finalist for “Most Innovative Company” and “Best Product Development Organization/Department” in 6th Annual Stevie® Awards.

“American Business Award entries grew more than 30% this year, so being named a Finalist is more of an accomplishment than ever before,” said Michael Gallagher, founder and president of The Stevie Awards. “It means that independent business executives have agreed that Clarus Systems is worthy of national recognition. We congratulate all of the Finalists on their achievement and wish them well in the competition.”

Clarus Systems unveiled the latest release of ClarusIPC, which offers enhanced business intelligence and performance management capabilities like enhanced reporting, data augmentation, analytics, advanced monitoring and alerting.

Clarus Systems will announce a new version of its flagship ClarusIPC application. According to Clarus, ClarusIPC Plus 2.4 offers end-to-end voice service management. Enhanced monitoring and alerting features include CUCM server performance, status changes for CUCM services and device registration changes.

Clarus Systems is adding business intelligence and performance management to its IP Communication and Contact Center software and calling it IPC Plus. The upgrade includes organizing data the platform gathers from the network and turning it into reports on inventory and service quality. The product enables clustering and load balancing of IPC servers to improve scaling and availability. Clarus IPC software tests, monitors, reports and troubleshoots networks to maximize contact center performance.

"With this latest launch, Clarus is likely to enjoy an extended reach as companies continue to look for ways to streamline the integration of voice and IT. For many organizations, this is still a new concept and to maximize the promised benefits, will turn to companies like Clarus for guidance.

In doing so, Clarus will strengthen its market stance and will be in a position to set the standard in the industry, driving further demand and revenue for its solutions."

"The key for [Clarus] is we look across two days," says McCaffrey. "Day one is deployment, and day two is operations." The biggest point is day one and day two kind of merge. So long as you have 10 phones deployed [in service], you are in day two. You need to monitor them while you are deploying the other 9,990 phones." During the day, Clarus' Voice Monitor continuously monitors a variety of call data using policies defined by the IT or telecom manager, including call quality, service availability, and security. Different monitoring policies can be put in place during different times of the week to send alerts via e-mail or SNMP if problems arise with low MOS scores, incorrectly routed calls, dropped or rejected calls, or if a certain number of phones become unregistered with the system."

Richard Whitehead, CTO of Clarus Systems, speaks to and TMC Editor, Rich Tehrani, about the company and about some of the trends taking place in the industry today.

Ken Camp, IPT blogger and published author of the book IP Telephony Demystified, interviewed Gurmeet at the IT Expo - the result is a Podcast that.s currently featured on http://www.realtime-unifiedcommunications.com.
As referenced by Ken, Gurmeet "raises the bar, and is one of the brightest, most insightful folks I've met in a long time." Please visit the site and listen to the dialogue that clearly depicts our market differentiators...Ken thinks you all are "doing some pretty cool stuff," and that "we've brought a new perspective and vision to the management of IPT."

"The new ClarusIPC Plus+ includes a Voice Monitor module to help users monitor voice quality, service availability, and security conditions through the use of a sophisticated rules and policy engine."

"Clarus Systems' ClarusIPC can conduct both extensive validation and testing but its real value lies in conducting automated and scheduled checking of phones on a nightly basis."

"We make sure that all of your IP phones work, for example, and we continue to do that after the initial installation, because as you know the IP environment can change. Many things can impact that environment. So what we offer is a product that can basically make a customer feel comfortable that they do have a good handle on their environment" - Terra Conlon, Sales Engineer

"Clarus made its name specifically in testing, but we now see our role considerably broadened into the management sphere, since testing has become part of the management process anyway." Richard Whitehead, CTO.

According to Zippy, whether you own a IP network, use one or make network equipment, it's clear that it's impossible to ignore VoIP testing in one form or other.

Excerpt: "Clarus' management tools allow managed services providers or IT departments to track configuration, changes and adds, ensure all phones expected to go live actually were installed correctly and take over a phone for services."

Excerpt: "MySQL is the high-performance data management engine powering Clarus Systems' IP telephony productivity solutions for integrators and enterprises," said Brendan Reidy, CEO at Clarus Systems. "MySQL's reliability and speed have helped us develop software that maximizes the availability and performance of enterprise telephony networks, even for very large, distributed deployments. MySQL's affordability and straight-forward licensing made it an easy choice."