MARLBORO, Mass., March 16, 2000 - Concord Communications., Inc. (NASDAQ:CCRD), the market leader in next-generation management solutions that ensure effective e-business, today announced an initiative to deliver eHealth's advanced multi-service management solutions to service providers through participation in the New World Ecosystem Program established by Cisco Systems, Inc., (NASDAQ: CSCO).
The Cisco New World Ecosystem is a community of technology partners working together to enable service providers to rapidly develop and deploy innovative networking services. Cisco and its partners offer a wide range of solutions for Packet Telephony, Voice Applications, Operations Support Systems and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS), Internetworking and E-Business. Cisco New World Ecosystem partners support open, standards-based architectures and a shared commitment to interoperable, multi-vendor implementations. Concord's eHealth family of products will help Cisco New World Ecosystem customers support more subscribers and better manage internal resources - ultimately decreasing costs and ensuring high quality-of-service.
Concord has a long-standing relationship with Cisco spanning product development, marketing and reference selling. Concord and Cisco also have a shared commitment to the service provider market. This rewarding partnership has provided a strong underpinning for the performance management solutions of Cisco's New World operations, as well as resulted in a number of tightly integrated, value-add solutions for Cisco WAN Manager, NetFlow FlowCollector and Cisco IOS. software-based Service Assurance Agent. These fine-tuned solutions enable Web hosters, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Outsourced IT Providers to more efficiently manage and deliver services, as well as meet high, customer-driven service levels. Plans are in place to provide close integration with Cisco's Virtual Private Networks (VPN) Solution Center.
"We are seeing a heightened demand for our e-business management solutions from telcos, Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Web hosters and other service providers," said Kevin Conklin, senior vice president of marketing for Concord. "By working closely with Cisco and their technology, we can effectively empower service providers to offer enhanced services with increased margins, lower costs and the highest level of quality."
As part of Concord and Cisco's extended relationship, eHealth functions as a multi-service performance management component of service providers' OSS, giving them the resources to effectively deliver multiple service offerings across diverse geographic regions. eHealth also enables service provider customers to enhance customer relationships and service, share knowledge, increase productivity and quickly poll up to 80,000 elements to ensure the maximum performance of their networks.
In an intensively competitive market, service providers must quickly and efficiently deliver new services without affecting current offerings, at a service level that meets customer expectations. As a partner within the Cisco New World Ecosystem, Concord will be able to more rapidly market and deliver mission-critical management solutions to service providers.
Bell Atlantic is one example of a telecommunications provider that has benefited from the powerful combination of Cisco and Concord technology. "Cisco and Concord's relationship is a good benefit for Bell Atlantic because it helps ensure that their products work together right out of the box," said Dave Bush, manager of the Bell Atlantic Internet regional operations center. "This is critical for companies like ours that need to roll out new services quickly."
"The Cisco New World Ecosystem program strengthens the important relationship between our two companies by providing Concord with additional marketing and technology resources to quickly deliver its latest technology enhancements to Cisco's customer base," said Steve Hoch, director of marketing for Cisco's Service Provider Line of Business. "These efforts will consolidate and centralize end-to-end service management through integrated OSS solutions, as well as further reinforce Cisco and Concord as leading providers of critical solutions for New World service providers."
