There seems to be an evolution in the testing market as these companies focus on delivering products and services enabling network equipment providers and carriers to test more services in less time. As networks become more commoditized and the competition to provide services continues to increase, quality of service is becoming more important than ever.

 

In a recent conversation with the new President and COO of Spirent, Rob Piconi, I had a chance to get Rob’s take on the future of testing and moreover learn about the company’s new testing offerings.

 

Rob’s message to customers is you need to deliver products and services as rapidly as possible and his company is best positioned to allow you to test these products and services before they are rolled out. Spirent he says has the deepest and broadest [testing] portfolio.

 

He points out how critical it is to work with the leading testing company when deploying FMC. And he has a point as in the world of fixed mobile convergence; you are dealing with wireless, wireline and potentially IMS. Although he didn’t mention it, I got to thinking about IMS implementations I have seen where Caller-ID is displayed on TV and a TV remote control is used to send SMS messages. As networks get more complex the need for a testing vendor to have a broader and broader portfolio of testing products across wireless, wireline and IPTV networks is critical.

 

Piconi was also proud of the fact the company has recently launched their Test Center 2.0 initiative which is reducing test cycle times 40-60% according to the Rob. He went on to say companies can test twice as fast and get things to market in half the time.

 

He further went on to explain how it is a waste of time to have a high-level person writing scripts. He says a single button and a GUI allows a test to be generated as a script.

 

Piconi’s closing comments were perhaps most indicative of how he feels about the new testing initiatives underway at the company. He said, “The new release was biggest thing in company in years… No one has done something like this with this much of a step change performance increase.” He concluded, “This changes the way customers do things and that is exciting for us."