VERSA Integrated Solutions
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In today’s IT environment, successful companies must have their foundation and growth laid out by future-thinking visionaries. Two such visionaries, Joseph Abban and Kevin Mitchell began their journey as network engineers for a large integrator, where they were responsible for designing and implementing the IP telephony and conferencing solution for the FDA’s new White Oak campus from 2002 to 2005. The campus included over 15 buildings that housed more than 11,000 users. It was during this roll out, that they had a vision of making IT better in the federal sector through increased customer focus and improved alignment with strategic goals and objectives, thus the birth of VERSA Integrated Solutions in 2005.To meet the FDA’s business needs at that time, VERSA recommended Cisco for both the network infrastructure and UC platform for all voice, video, and data services which remains in place today. VERSA’s success with Cisco at FDA has led to the continued engineering, implementation, and support of similar services for several other agencies throughout the federal government.

The company is driven by its mission to deliver technical expertise and engineering solutions that are cost-effective and offer a quantifiable ROI. Credited to its founders–Joseph and Kevin, VERSA promotes a culture of engineering excellence and continuous knowledge sharing that gives it an edge over the competition. VERSA’s founders also possess and maintain hands-on experience in the Cisco platform as UC engineers and project engineers, which allows them to provide true technical leadership and direction for the company. Cisco continues to be a key component in the development of VERSA customer IT platforms.

Today, as a premier Cisco partner, VERSA engineers are responding to new communication demands for customers sparked by the pandemic crisis.“Advanced collaboration and specialization, combined with Cisco UC, forms the core of our service delivery,” says Mitchell, CEO of VERSA. Over the years, with a steady inflow of knowledge and expertise, the company has grown into a robust end-to-end enterprise transformation service provider. VERSA specializes in network engineering services, data centers, as well as cloud initiatives.

“In an ever-changing Information Technology landscape, VERSA ensures that delivered solutions are always current and engineered to change and grow as customers’ business requirements continue to evolve,” says Abban, President of VERSA. The company is taking every step to adapt and remain at the forefront of the changing IT climate. For customers like FDA and NIH, the number of remote users has increased dramatically, reaching up to as many as 35,000 people simultaneously. For FDA, the remote VPN access was sized to support up to 20,000 user licenses, but not under simultaneous use. While the VPN was only designed to accommodate up to 4,000 concurrent audio calls, during the COVID-19pandemic, VPN usage peaked to over 19,000 simultaneous users. VERSA was able to quickly work through this exponential change in business requirements and scale the solution to meet the new demands for remote work access.

“Essentially, we deliver the entire gamut of digital transformation services for our customers,” says Shashank Kaul, Principal Architect at VERSA. As seasoned integrators and trusted advisors, the engineers at VERSA develop high value solutions within established customer budgets. Their focus remains on meeting defined business requirements and ensuring service reliability and availability within any existing regulatory and IT security constraints. VERSA has also become instrumental in assessing and developing Cloud architectures and migration strategies for customers to move from a traditional CapEx to an OpEx model for IT services, increasing predictability and stability in annual operating costs.

VERSA typically takes a hybrid approach to cloud migrations, strategically moving specific services over time to ensure day to day operations are not disrupted, training is not overwhelming, and systems are accepted by the end users.

The company is currently assessing the new Cisco DevNet Specialization, which will further complement their services portfolio and enhance their customer solutions through the use of product APIs. Through the use of Cisco products and solutions, VERSA is supporting up to ten contact centers for NIH and another ten for the US Census Bureau which uses the Cisco Unified Contact Center enterprise environment. With Cisco’s upcoming architecture specializations, VERSA will further bolster the capabilities of these contact centers.

In an ever-changing Information Technology landscape, VERSA ensures that delivered solutions are always current and engineered to change and grow as customers’ business requirements continue to evolve

VERSA’s service portfolio is predicated upon the creation and commitment of partnerships. In place of a direct vendor to customer relationship, VERSA acts as a seamless value-added bridge between Cisco and its customers. If a customer has preferences that fall outside the Cisco realm, VERSA has the ability to independently test and integratenon-conforming components into a Cisco infrastructure. The trust that VERSA develops as an objective and honest broker with its customers enables them to rapidly deploy solutions with 100 percent customer satisfaction. VERSA’s achievements are the result of the long-term vision of its engineers and leadership, which goes beyond just providing the required engineering services. “Unlike other integrators, we work closely with the client leadership to assist in building their technology and services roadmaps with an effective execution strategy that is unique for their environment. This is what sets us apart in this space,” remarks Kaul.

VERSA is always seeking new opportunities and relationships to adapt and shore up its technological services. “The IT enterprise world is migrating from hardware-based solutions to software defined solutions, and that is where we are headed,” says Mitchell. VERSA not only ensures each of its engineers is kept current on technology, but also informs its clients on new developments and opportunities that keep them at the helm of technical change. Expanding on successes in the civilian government space, the company now offers services and solutions in the defense space. “The next step for us is to expand our capabilities, not only in terms of a broader customer base, but also a wider network of valued partners,” concludes Mitchell.