TeamQuest

I recently had the opportunity to speak with TeamQuest Corporation’s director of communications, Keith Hanna, about the IP communications space, SIP and the overall direction of the company.
 
TeamQuest Corporation is a provider of IT Service Optimization, specializing in Capacity Management software. TeamQuest helps IT organizations consistently meet service levels while minimizing costs and mitigating risks.
 
To learn more about the company, read this article that appeared on TMCnet from earlier this year.
 
RT: Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
KH: TeamQuest Corporation is the global leader in IT service optimization, specializing in Capacity Management software that helps IT organizations consistently meet service levels while minimizing costs and mitigating risks.
 
The company recently announced TeamQuest Performance Software Release 10 — the next evolution in enterprise-class Capacity Management software.
 
TeamQuest is focused on delivering software that meets the changing needs of the data center. The company is currently focused on extending its capabilities in the virtualized environment as well as providing TeamQuest software users with the ability to enjoy easy to use enterprise-class tools for investigating IT service performance.
 
Two new products, IT Service Reporter and IT Service Analyzer, are rich Web applications that provide a desktop-quality user interface accessible from a browser.
 
Release 10 also introduces the concept of IT Resources which facilitate customized views of IT infrastructure. IT Resources define relationships between hardware and software components, allowing users to view infrastructure components by tier, platforms, location, or in terms of the IT Services they support.
 
RT: How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
KH: TeamQuest’s role in the IP communications market will become increasingly critical to enterprise and telecom providers to ensure the underlying computing infrastructure of these systems, and the services delivered by IP communications are optimized.
 
As IP communications continues to proliferate, so will the enterprise and customer-facing applications that rely on optimized computing. Application architectures such as Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the emerging IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) are reliant on IP communications.
 
RT: How has SIP changed communications?
KH: The telecommunications market took more than 100 years to mature, yet almost overnight the Internet, IP communications and now Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) have turned the industry on its head. Of course, without the Internet and IP communications, SIP has no value. Coupled with IP communications, SIP can enable almost anyone to become a telephone company. With SIP-based software and SIP-compliant telephone devices, a large-scale, widely distributed, and feature-rich telecommunications network can be architected over the Internet.
 
RT: What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
KH: Scalability and automation are the most common requests from our customer base. Our customers want scalable Capacity Management tools to gain a strategic advantage against the competition.
 
RT: How are you answering their demands?
KH: We work with our clients, engaging them at most points throughout the development of our software releases. In fact, Release 10 shows how we listened to our partners in providing a strategic, scalable Capacity Management tool. Our two new products, IT Service Reporter and IT Service Analyzer are summarized below:
 
TeamQuest IT Service Reporter provides an intuitive, flexible, and highly interactive, drag-and-drop interface for easy creation and customization of management reports. Include corporate logos, explanatory text, and the most appropriate charts for different audiences.
 
TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer provides an easy to use enterprise-class tool for investigating IT service performance, even in highly distributed heterogeneous environments.
 
In addition to the two new products, Release 10 also provides improved predictive modeling support for virtualized environments, improvements to zSeries analysis, and much more.
 
RT: What do you think the future of the market is?
KH: TeamQuest can’t predict where the market is headed, but we believe that the ability to consistently deliver services to the customer is very important because that is an area where companies can gain a competitive advantage.
 
RT: What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
KH: It adds non-traditional elements to the environment. Their results in telecom may enable other peripheral players to enter the market, which could result in diversification of market segments, technologies and applications.
 
RT: How about Microsoft?
KH: Microsoft’s size alone can cause waves in the market. Microsoft’s sheer force may cause the industry to shift in its direction.
 
RT: How will wireless technologies change our market?
KH: Successful proliferation of WiMAX and municipal WiFi systems will further extend the reach of broadband technologies and the Internet. This will continue to accelerate IP communications and associated applications, placing an emphasis on ensuring quality services are delivered to customers.
 
RT: How will communications evolve over the next five years?
KH: The decline of wired services and migration to wireless will result in more mobile workforce. This would cause decentralizing of the workforce through increased deployment of work-at-home and other similar actions.
 
RT: What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?
KH: Next-generation technologies such as SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and SDF (Service Delivery Frameworks) foist rapid change onto many parts of the telecom industry, including its core architecture.
 
These technologies demand more attention from Capacity Management early in the service implementation process when designing and scaling the IT infrastructure to support various and multiplying service types, and to maintain the service quality necessary to attract and retain rapid subscriber adoption.
 
For example, the prospect of supporting extreme transaction processing alone suggests that some kind of optimization strategy is necessary in the datacenter.
 
Carriers need to plan ahead to optimize the underlying server computing infrastructure for SOA and IMS in the face of rapid subscriber adoption and extreme transaction processing. What good is it to rapidly deploy new service applications and turn up many new customers if the underlying systems cannot support the accelerating processing load?
 
RT: Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
KH: Attendees must see the bigger picture. Network management needs to become “enterprise” management. There is a tremendous amount of technology to understand and many “moving parts” to go wrong. Yes, the network is important, but with the advent of virtualized servers, grid computing and a more mobile workforce, workload volumes can quickly shift locations which can make effective network management challenging.
 
I see the need for network management to converge with the other IT management disciplines to become “enterprise” management.
 
RT: What do you want the industry to know about your company?
KH: Many leading telecom service providers and Fortune 500 enterprises have selected TeamQuest and its data and analysis software to optimize their environments.
 
Customers use TeamQuest’s software platform to optimize the performance and capacity of their open system servers and mainframe servers. TeamQuest offers an innovative Analytical Modeling technology capable of complex “What-If” analyses of future IT systems performance.
 
Many network operators and service providers use TeamQuest software to make informed decisions as to how growth will affect their operations, helping them mitigate the risks associated with mission critical decisions.
 
RT: Please make one surprising prediction we will see in five years.
KH: Technology will be developed, and deployment started, that delivers high-speed wireless access to rural areas; thereby exploding internet use and changing the way companies and governments do business and improving people communications, collaborations.

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