Mr. Young: ClearPath was founded to enable small to mid-market companies to deploy a distributed application wide area network more quickly and cost effectively. Many smaller and mid-size businesses are really challenged when competing with larger, more vertically integrated competitors that are able to leverage distributed applications across their business environment, whether that be to branch offices or trading partners, or even for their remote access needs. Companies with wide area networks are able to gain productivity benefits and more efficiently move information throughout the organization. Our unique solution addressed the needs of thousands of businesses that don't have the technical expertise to deploy and manage a wide area network yet want to deploy distributed applications (e.g. CRM, ERP, POS, etc). ClearPath has been at the forefront of network-based managed services that offer a turnkey bundled solution; enabling businesses to effectively 'plug into our network environment' and utilize our infrastructure to immediately realize both visibility and control over a powerful WAN environment. We provision a circuit from a customer's premise into our network backbone. From there, we provide a MPLS VPN and fully integrated network based applications that bundled together and delivered through our proprietary web software, 'iNOC,' we are able to configure, manage and deliver a private network environment that gives them the quality of service they need to distribute applications across their environment.
TWST: Who is the typical customer?
Mr. Young: A typical customer has five to 50 locations, although we have
customers that have up to several hundred locations. They are generally
early in the technology-adoption curve. They may not have a network
environment in place today or they may have a simple frame relay network
or just plain old Internet access at each site. As these organizations
begin looking to deploy or distribute an application across this wide
area network to either their branch offices or their trading partners
the requirements and complexity increase significantly. The way we
typically reach these companies is through channel partners that are
primarily systems integrators and consultants who advise these customers
on applications and network topologies. So the customer that chooses
ClearPath is one that is looking to deploy an application over a
relatively short period of time. They lack the expertise to be able to
deploy it themselves, so they want to get the benefits of outsourcing
the solution, but they still have the need to maintain some measure of
control over that network environment, and in order for them to have
that control they need to have visibility into the network. So what
ClearPath has done to address that need is to combine the private
network environment with network-based applications that enable the
customer to be able to manage that network environment. We deliver those
applications through a Web-based client interface, providing complete
real-time visibility into each of the nodes on the network and even
devices on each local area network (LAN). Unique to ClearPath customers
is the ability to control how that network performs by adjusting the
priority of traffic, by adjusting their security profile through a
managed firewall application, through content filtering and being able
to control what access users have going off to the Internet as well as
virus scanning and other types of security applications.
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