EMC Corporation today announced that McLeodUSA Incorporated (NASDAQ: MCLD), one of the nation's largest independent competitive telecommunications services providers, has selected the Cisco Network Connectivity Center (CNCC) for the company's range of integrated communications services. CNCC uses EMC Smarts software as its core IP management engine.

Under CNCC, Cisco offers a broad range of EMC Smarts solutions, including Service Assurance Manager, IP Availability Manager, IP Performance Manager, Business Impact Manager, Application Services Manager, Application Connectivity Manager, MPLS-VPN Manager, Network Protocol Manager, ATM/Frame Relay Manager, Report Manager and Business Dashboard.

"We're very proud of our history of working with Cisco," said Dennis Hoffman, Vice President of Product Marketing, EMC Software. "The combination of Cisco and EMC management software provides customers like McLeodUSA with solutions that embed expanded intelligence and automate the most difficult tasks in IT infrastructure management."

McLeodUSA provides voice, data, wireless and Internet services under the Preferred Advantage® product portfolio to residential and business customers. Using a range of Smarts solutions, McLeodUSA is able to gain end-to-end visibility into its wide array of integrated communications services and automate detection and root cause analysis of network faults. Smarts technology also enables service providers to automatically diagnose end-to-end network-level problems that disrupt the reliable delivery of communications services.

"With the launch of our next-generation Voice-over-IP services and enhanced Managed Services offerings, we are committed to utilizing the most reliable, secure, and cost-effective technology in our network," said Andreas Papanicolaou, Executive Vice President of Network Services at McLeodUSA. "With EMC Smarts, McLeodUSA can continue to deliver value-added services to its customers at affordable costs, while continuing to exceed a customer satisfaction rating of 92% and network reliability performance of 99.999%."

"To continue to achieve its goal of providing world-class telecommunications services, McLeodUSA demanded a management solution that could provide real-time, actionable intelligence about customer networks, applications and business services," said Peter Eck, Director of Product Marketing, EMC Software. "With a unique ability to dynamically pinpoint service-affecting problems across technology domains – immediately calculating that problem's impact on critical customer services – EMC Smarts is quickly becoming a logical choice for today's leading service providers."

Smarts software solutions detect and help customers rapidly resolve the IT management problems that affect business services. Enterprise, service provider and government organizations leverage the software's comprehensive discovery, built-in information model, intelligent analytics and advanced automation to conduct real-time root cause and impact analysis and gain unprecedented insight into how technology health impacts business. By automating high-cost, labor-intensive tasks, Smarts software enables customers to improve quality of service, lower operating costs, increase revenue and reduce business risk.