Duane Sword, vice president of product management at Empirix Inc., said one of the benefits of being in the test and measurement space is that service providers look to you as a neutral, trusted adviser. As a result, he said, the company has been getting a lot of questions from service providers about IMS.
Service providers, who are sometimes confused by the different names and categorizations various vendors put on their products, have been seeking such information as what components constitute an IMS infrastructure; potential problems in implementing IMS; and what the IMS Forum and other industry groups are doing related to IMS interoperability.
These and other questions and sources of confusion have led Empirix to create a seminar series and write a book to educate the industry on IMS. Empirix has already presented 40 seminars worldwide to audiences that include service providers as well as vendors and systems integrators, Sword told xchange June 5 in a phone interview he was doing from one of those events in Israel.
For those that didn’t make it to one of the seminars, but are attending NXTcomm, Empirix is distributing in Booth 7418 free copies of the book "Ensuring a Quality IMS Experience: A Practical Guide to Testing and Monitoring IP Multimedia Subsystems and Services," of which Chad Hart, Empirix product marketing manager, was the main author. In the book, Empirix offers best practices and suggested deployment strategies based on what the company has learned from working directly with customers that are implementing IMS adoption plans, explained Sword.
Empirix is best known for its test and monitoring solutions in the voice applications space. According to Frost & Sullivan, the company has been the market share leader in VoIP for R&D testing for the last for years.
Just two years ago, Empirix launched a new solution for service provider network monitoring, and the company already occupies the No. 3 market share position in that space behind Agilent and Tektronix, said Sword.
The Hammer testing and monitoring solutions from Empirix are designed to ensure the quality and performance of VoIP and IP storage applications throughout their life cycle. At NXTcomm, Empirix expects to announce and show six new product updates to its Hammer line, said Sword.
The Hammer line was part of the second IMS Forum Plugfest earlier this month at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab. It was employed in a variety of scenarios to simulate SIP and IMS end users and emulate IMS infrastructure devices, including the diameter-based HSS.
Sword said one of the biggest challenges of IMS is how to use different vendors’ equipment in this architecture and ensure the expected QoS can be supported over that multivendor solution. That’s a real concern, he said, explaining that in a real-world example a corrupted diameter message can result in all data being dumped from an HSS.
“The particular manufacturer has done a great job with the database, but because of the malicious nature service providers operate in, service providers want to make sure their networks can deal with negative stuff” not just regular operating scenarios, said Sword.
Empirix Inc. www.empirix.com
