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Last year was a good one for Clarus Systems (News - Alert), which continues to expand the breadth of its products as well as its partnerships. In the year ahead, the company plans to focus on three key pillars: analytics, video and telepresence, and the cloud.

That’s according to Gurmeet Lamba, senior vice president of product development, which TMC (News - Alert) interviewed today at press day on the eve of ITEXPO East in Miami.

Clarus System sells ClarusIPC Plus, which is management and monitoring software focused on VoIP and UC. It sits in the data center and doesn’t involved agents or probes. The solution – which does end-to-end automated testing, passive monitoring, configuration and change management, and business intelligence analytics – is used by various verticals, including the financial and energy verticals, as well as by cloud/hosted service providers.

Lamba says Clarus Systems, which saw its bookings go up more than 170 percent in 2010, is seeing the market maturing and has done very well in creating depth in its product over the years. Now, he says, the company is focusing on the breadth of its products by expanding what it monitors. (The company recently added presence monitoring, contact center monitoring, and monitoring for Cisco (News - Alert) Unity Connection.) This allows Clarus customers to use the company’s solution to do things such as ensure that message waiting lights are being turned on and off correctly, for example, he says.

The company also recently announced new partnerships with Cisco Systems (News - Alert) and HP. The partnership with Cisco is focused on doing verification of new installations, among other things, says Lamba. The HP partnership centers around integration of the Clarus product and the HP Network Node Manager.

As discussed above, Clarus is also keen on analytics, video and telepresence, and the cloud. While the company already has existing solutions for all of the above, it expects to expand its offerings in these areas and have a strong marketing push in these areas.

Analytics, Lamba explains, have to do with leveraging the “gold mine” of data in the Clarus system to do things like resource management.

If a telepresence call doesn’t work as planned, it can be disastrous. The Clarus solution can come into play to make sure telepresence calls go off without a hitch.

Clarus can also help cloud communications providers deliver and meet service level agreements, he says. He adds that customers will move to the cloud when they have confidence in the cloud, and that SLAs can help build that kind of confidence. “It’s a chicken and egg thing,” he says of cloud uptake. “Cloud is big for us,” says Lamba. “It really comes down to the business customers having confidence in the cloud. You’ve got to get past the smoke and mirrors. Visibility leads to confidence. Confidence leads to adoption.”