Empirix

IMS is often thought of as "the" next generation network (NGN) architecture that is meant to unite all available access technologies. However, achieving this will be an ongoing challenge for many years to come. In this article Chad Hart addresses the challenges and puts forward the case for a lifecycle approach to testing and monitoring IMS networks.

Maybe because it was fall and the World Series was in the air, but something led Mu Dynamics' Adam Stein to pull out a baseball analogy to describe the state of next-generation network testing...

Some say the oil of technology and the water of finance shouldn't mix but, when it comes to test and measurement, they need to work together to achieve their goals, writes George Malim.

Brian Gollaher, Senior Product Manager, Contact Centers, Empirix, discusses network monitoring for the contact center - how load testing and transaction monitoring can help you keep track of what's going on in the network - with NoJitter Editor and Lead Blogger Eric Krapf.

Helping organizations to confidently implement complex communications solutions, Empirix today announced Hammer XMS 2.0. Claimed to be the most comprehensive solution for monitoring voice over IP (VoIP) in its class, Hammer XMS 2.0 gives users greater scalability, improved diagnostics and presentation of complex call flows, and better service quality assessment...

Unfortunately a majority of contact centers are not taking appropriate actions to minimize the impact of disasters or disruptions related to changes in their operating environments. Adding to this risk, a majority of these companies have not invested in testing and monitoring equipment to better understand, identify, and, in most cases, resolve issues before customers are affected.

Achieving the best possible voice quality is everyone's goal. Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) fret over it from early-stage unit testing in R&D labs through verification in trials and pilot projects. Application developers ponder what algorithms will yield the best Quality of Service (QoS)...

The contact center is often the first - and sometimes only - face that your organization presents to the public. If your customer has a bad contact center-related experience and doesn't like it, then they don't like your company either (guilt by association and all that). The result: you've lost a would-be loyal customer...

Two days - two shows, two cities and two trains which left at dawn. Wow... What a rush. What I picked up from the Channel Partners (Boston) and SpeechTek (New York) shows is the communications market and the call center market are doing well, based on what companies in the space tell me...

The pace of IMS adoption by the world's carriers has been buffeted by an amazing number of factors: The current world economic situation has slowed some carriers who are worried about the total cost of converting their infrastructure to IMS, even over a period of years; the idea that IMS is still evolving in the light of new ways of delivering services (Web Services, SOA, SaaS, etc.), many of which by themselves are perhaps more adept at delivering non-telephony services than IMS; competition from cheaper alternatives such as UMA, and the fact that IMS was an early victim of the classic "hype cycle"...

Although we've long championed LAN and WAN monitoring for business, Service Providers (SPs) also need to constantly monitor networks for traffic congestion and failing systems, be it their own or the ones they take care of in managed services scenarios...

Your initial reaction to the question in the title may be "yes, of course". You know that a crisis of any scale - from a power outage to a natural disaster - has the potential of putting you out of business. In order to prepare for the worse you've got a recovery site ready and waiting

For quite a while now we've followed the Plugfests of the IMS Forum (now called the IMS/NGN Forum) all of which facilitate industry-wide certifications of IMS applications and services interoperability. These Plugfests have generally been held at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL). The Forum has the good fortune of hosting testing companies as well as...

I recently had the opportunity to ask Gordon Eddy, Sr. Director of Product Management and Marketing at Empirix, about the evolution voice application testing and monitoring solutions and the direction the company is taking.

There's more than one way to annoy - and then lose - a lifelong customer when you switch to a VoIP contact center. Surly agents and improper training are just two of the factors that can result in disgruntled customers and compromised productivity. But that's not all that contact-center managers...

IMS has been hailed as the unifying architecture for disparate access technologies and a panacea for crippling vendor interoperability issues. But the reality is different: IMS creates an intricate, hard-to manage architecture based on standards which are in constant flux.

What's been commonly referred to as VoIP testing has expanded in recent years to include all of IP Communications. Networks are simulated and as many tests as possible are done before actual deployments of VoIP, mobile or triple play networks and or equipment...

With the Formula One season kicking off this weekend in Melbourne, Honda Racing F1 Team has used Empirix to help it revamp its website, which now offers a dedicated racing TV channel and news.

February 1, 2008 - Caught up in the surge of interest in agile processes, toolmakers have quietly changed the way they market their offerings. Instead of focusing on role-based development, with dedicated tools for architects, coders and testers, they are tipping their hats to ideas at the heart of agile development.

January, 2008 - Once applications are in production, VoiceWatch provides a live monitoring service that places calls into a contact center on a live basis every 15 minutes or so, allowing operations staff to be notified if there's a delay in any step of the call through completion to an agent. A recently announced capability provides testing and monitoring of backup systems and the applications that run on them