Concord Communications Wednesday announced plans to acquire Vitel Software in a $4 million deal expected to close by the end of January.

Concord's flagship eHealth platform manages network, application and system performance with a combination of server and distributed agent software. Vitel products manage legacy and IP PBXs and voicemail systems, currently for about 300 customers.

"Legacy systems aren't going away and we recognized that managing voice was a hard problem for us to solve," says Dayton Semerjian, executive vice president of marketing and alliances. "Voice over IP is really becoming a hybrid environment. A lot of our partners like Cisco, Nortel and Avaya have big legacy PBX installed bases and we want to help them tie the legacy with today's voice together with service management software."

Concord says the company will first offer Worcester, Mass.-based Vitel's voice network performance management software stand-alone until mid-2005 when the company says it will deliver adapters to integrate Vitel products into Concord's eHealth network and application performance management software.

"Our developers are already putting effort into integrating eHealth with Vitel and making sure we can get their traps into eHealth," says Paula Daley, product marketing manager for voice at Concord. "Once we get all that information into eHealth, we will be able to generate reports on how voice relates to network traffic."

Vitel’s a dozen or so employees will relocate to work in Concord's Marlborough, Mass., location.