Mar 10, 2011 11:09 AM,

Empirix: UC service assurance soon to be a necessity for operators

By Rich Karpinski

Test and monitoring vendor introduces a new unified communications service assurance platform, saying its experience in the enterprise tells it carriers will soon be needing similar capabilities

Unified communications (UC) gets a bad rap, in part because the ways in which it was supposed to appear -- driven by fancy phones at home and the office – hasn’t really worked out.

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But surprise: some very sophisticated pockets of UC services – combining voice, messaging, chat, video and more— have begun to appear. Where? One: in the call center, where UC-equipped agents are taxing enterprise networks with a mix of customer interactions. And two: slowly but surely on mobile networks , where smartphone users are getting used to using a mix of voice, messaging, video, social media (like Twitter) and app services – in some cases simultaneously.

This week, Empirix launched a new Unified Communications Assurance Platform driven by its experiences serving the enterprise call center market but aiming for the bigger prize by ultimately helping service providers – most notably mobile operators – ready their networks to deliver a mix of UC services to their customers.

“Our whole UC assurance platform came out of our enterprise side, but it has major relevance for service providers as well,” said Bob Hockman, director of product marketing for Empirix. “We’ve been helping large contact centers understand the quality of their [network] communications from a user perspective. What we noticed was that as they put in new IP [voice] systems, moving from TDM to VoIP, they also wanted to start using chat [and other UC-style services]. And suddenly, they were having a voice quality problem, and they didn’t know why.”

In the past year, IP service assurance has been a huge topic in the industry (see: Service assurance getting hotter; Service assurance '2.0': Bridging customer experience, network management), with vendors pitching platforms to help service providers manage not just their new IP networks but the services that run over them. Like any new capability, IP service assurance platforms have initially been deployed to support basic services, like voice over IP or mobile data services.

But more complex UC-style IP services are emerging quickly as well.

Next: Translating the call center UC experience to operator networks