With so many communications technologies being used at any given time, it takes months to test all the components of a given IP service or vendor product. It can take several months alone to actually obtain relevant test cases from a third-party vendor or manually script your own.

 

And with time to market a critical issue in gaining ROI, the many-months process makes waiting a stressful proposition.

 

Mu Dynamics (News - Alert), maker of the Mu Test Suite solution, is a company that aims to help network equipment manufacturers and Tier 1 operators lower the cost of IP service testing. The company’s signature product reportedly delivers tenfold productivity improvement over traditional testing solutions.

“The Mu Test Suite allows multiple aspects of testing to occur simultaneously, including interoperability, security and resilience testing – all in a single platform so work done by customers using XML-based templates leveraged across testing types,” said Adam Stein (News - Alert), vice president of Mu Dynamics.

 

To emphasize the importance of having a testing product like this on the market, Mu Dynamics has published a new white paper outlining some of the issues its clients face.

 

Behind the scenes, IP services are characterized by enormous complexity, constant change and custom building blocks. Regardless of industry, each IP service has its own unique configuration, which presents challenges to NEMs, independent product and software vendors, network operators and service providers, smart grid operators and government agencies.

 

“IP service complexity continues to escalate and barriers are rapidly fading for testing between network infrastructure, wired and mobile services, the cloud and enterprise services and smart grid,” said Olga Yashova, a research analyst for test and measurement at Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert). “The breadth and scope of IP service interactions simply no longer scales to successfully test solely by protocol, load or canned test cases.”

 

According to Mu Dynamics, which cites data from NSP as well as customers, the average time to test a new IP service or related product prior to using Mu is more than 12 months. Additionally, the average cost of using traditional or manual testing exceeds $4 million, or 10 percent of product development costs.

 

To address these challenges, Mu Dynamics released its full Test Suite in 2009. And this week, Mu this week announced a number of significant expansions that make the Suite more powerful.

“The new capabilities we are announcing today come as a direct response to the widespread pain we see in our existing customer base,” said Dave Kresse (News - Alert), CEO of Mu Dynamics. “Our award-winning Mu Test Suite now addresses a broader set of our customers’ challenges and is already at work doing a better job of enabling our customers to roll out higher-quality IP services more quickly and cost effectively.”