ShoreGroup Announces Availability of CaseSentry Management for Cisco’s Unified Computing System

Expanded CaseSentry functionality supports the management of Unified Communications on the virtualized Cisco Unified Computing System

NEW YORK, NY. August 10, 2010 — ShoreGroup, Inc., a premier unified communications and systems management solutions provider, today announced that its CaseSentry System Management platform now supports monitoring and management of Cisco's Unified Computing System™. By extending management to the computing, networking and virtualization capabilities of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), ShoreGroup's CaseSentry provides complete end-to-end visibility to the availability and performance of mission-critical Cisco Unified Communications and Unified Contact Center services that are deployed on the Cisco UCS platform. This announcement is a continuation of ShoreGroup's data center strategy, which includes the recent introduction of the company's virtualized CaseSentry (vCS) architecture that runs on the UCS platform.

While the shift from traditional computing architectures to virtualization dramatically reduces the number of servers and devices that organizations must purchase, deploy, operate and maintain, the criticality of fault tolerance and effective management of availability and performance becomes proportionally more significant. To meet these demands, the CaseSentry Systems Management platform manages Cisco UCS through a powerful combination of its own patented management capabilities, VMware management utilities, and the Cisco UCS Manager, which provides centralized and embedded management of all software and hardware components of the Cisco UCS across multiple chassis and thousands of virtual machines. Heterogeneous monitoring and advanced incident analysis methodologies for Cisco UCS, data center, network, and communication and collaboration applications enable CaseSentry to systematically evaluate and correlate events across technologies, quickly determine the root cause, and route the incident to the responsible workgroup for their immediate attention. The result of CaseSentry's uniquely integrated and automated management and workflow applications, together with its eBonding help desk integration, is unified visibility into the operational state of the data center and network, improved resource utilization and productivity, faster incident resolution times that reduces business impact, and measurement of service levels being delivered.

"With the addition of Cisco UCS to the growing portfolio of systems and applications managed by CaseSentry, the capabilities our clients currently have in managing their Cisco unified communications environment can now be extended into the data center," said David Lovy, Chief Engineer at ShoreGroup. "The value of CaseSentry's ability to recognize and analyze events from multiple sources and precisely determine the root cause becomes even more valuable as the number and scope of inter-dependencies increases, and this is certainly the case with virtualization. By managing across the technologies and virtual instances, and applying its automated workflow processes, CaseSentry is the governance portal that harmonizes the data center, storage, telephony, contact center and network support workgroups to streamline the incident resolution process and increase availability for mission-critical services."

"Service providers and large enterprises are moving to Cisco Unified Computing and virtualization to accelerate the delivery of new services, reduce their total cost of ownership, and gain the ability to scale their resources in parallel with business demand," said Scott Kimmelman, ShoreGroup's Executive Vice President. "This value proposition is particularly compelling for the introduction and expansion of unified communications and collaboration services, which has driven the demand for CaseSentry's management capabilities to be extended to Cisco unified communications and contact center solutions running in the virtualized environment. Through heterogeneous management that includes the Cisco UCS hardware, virtualization, applications and the network, CaseSentry provides our clients with the complete visibility and control they need to monitor the service experience being delivered end-to-end."

CaseSentry's patented architecture provides the powerful foundation from which a variety of systems and application management capabilities are performed, including monitoring, diagnosing and documenting problems that impact systems and processes within a complex network environment. CaseSentry's Operational Services Automation (OSA) solution resides on a single platform that contains the fully integrated service management, systems management, change management and workflow automation capabilities that organizations need to effectively manage and support their vital networked systems and applications, unified communications, contact centers and complex end-to-end business process transactions. CaseSentry is available as a comprehensive and cost-effective Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that includes implementation, maintenance, change administration and routine enhancements and upgrades. The CaseSentry platform is also a core component to ShoreGroup's ShorePatrol Remote Management Service (RMS) and other services offered by the company under OEM agreements with major worldwide network equipment manufacturing and service organizations.

About ShoreGroup, Inc.

ShoreGroup delivers a complete portfolio of industry-leading management applications, maintenance solutions, professional services and products for Unified Communications networks. ShoreGroup develops innovative management applications on its dynamic CaseSentry® platform, eliminating the pitfalls of traditional management systems to enable IT, telecom and contact center support organizations to easily and effectively manage availability, performance, service levels and support processes for complex networked environments. The company's ShorePatrol™ Remote Management Service delivers the high-quality unified communications monitoring, maintenance and support that organizations rely upon to ensure the availability of their vital business processes.

ShoreGroup's professional service solutions provide leading consultation, design and implementation services for high-availability networks. The company's expertise in unified communications including IP Telephony/VoIP and IP contact centers, LAN/WAN, data center, telepresence, wireless and security produces manageable solutions that optimize business processes, communications, employee productivity and accessibility to enable organizations to derive the maximum business value from their information technology investment. As a Cisco Gold Certified Partner with advanced specializations, ShoreGroup's service portfolio is backed by solid industry credentials.

Cisco and Cisco Systems are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and certain other countries. CaseSentry®, ShoreGroup®, SG Logo®, ShorePatrol® and THE ART OF IT® are registered trademarks of ShoreGroup, Inc. All other marks are property of their respective owners.