Services News South Africa

Acquisition will extend Westcon's unified communications solutions

Westcon Works, a division of Westcon SA, will soon be able to extend its offerings into providing services around better managing the application and network performance of unified communications, after partner OPNET Technologies recently announced the acquisition of Clarus Systems.

As a result of the deal Westcon Works will take advantage of Clarus software's portfolio of end-to-end service management for enterprise voice over IP (VoIP), unified communications, and TelePresence video. The company's customers include Global 100 enterprises in financial services, healthcare, energy, communications, as well as system integrators, and managed service providers.

"Unified communications solutions are fast becoming a given with the enterprise network, yet they still face challenges by way of quality and performance, especially when implemented in a converged network," states Jacques Malherbe, CEO of Westcon SA. "With the inclusion of the Clarus Software solution to the OPNET portfolio we will be able to better assist our system integrators with ensuring the quality and stability of their unified communications systems and in turn their voice and video architectures."

Centralised management capabilities

This is particularly relevant to Westcon Works as they are seeing an increase in the pervasive use and integration of voice and video into business applications, a growing need for teleconferencing and surveillance, as well as a desire by corporate IT to better manage their unified communications solutions.

With the new solutions Westcon Works will be able to provide customers with a solution that combines pre-deployment, continuous testing, production monitoring, help-desk capabilities, and business analytics. It also offers centralised management capabilities, as well as network, application and system visibility and the real-time monitoring of voice and video quality.

"As businesses journey towards the cloud through virtualisation, it remains critical for them to ensure that their enterprise solutions are able to handle the shift, without compromising quality of application delivery. We welcome innovation by our vendor partners who, through foresight and preparation, are assisting our own customers in taking this journey with ease," ends Malherbe.

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