Expectations mount when you’re in the big leagues.

 

If you’re an outfielder for a major-league baseball team, you’re expected to catch every fly ball that doesn’t roll over the back wall, and throw on a line from rightfield to first base. And if you’re a big-league Tier 1 operator, you’re expected to ensure the interoperability of third-party applications running your networks.

 

But keeping pace to ensure these applications don’t cause any issues with an operator’s core network can present a bit of a challenge. To meet this challenge, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Mu Dynamics (News - Alert) recently unveiled a new, improved IP services testing kit.

“Unlike the controlled networks of years-past, today’s networks enable rapid deployment of third-party applications yet leave precious little time to ensure full interoperability testing,” Dave Kresse (News - Alert), CEO for Mu Dynamics, told TMCnet. “In fact, the only way to ensure interoperability is to essentially ‘sample’ that new application’s service traffic and “play” it back in concert with existing network traffic.

 

Calling it the industry’s only integrated solution to quickly and cost-effectively address the key requirements of IP service testing regardless of the specific customer ecosystem, Mu’s upgraded Test Suite includes two critical capabilities. First, it gives its users ability to model the logic of an IP service for the purposes of testing. Second, it uses actual service traffic as the basis for rapid and automated test case creation that can leveraged across multiple aspects of testing – functional, interoperability, resilience and security.

 

The refined testing methods are designed to test more accurately the actual services that need testing. The spruced-up Suite obtains a better sampling of IP service traffic – or test cases built from vendors and operators IP service traffic – which expedites both the testing time and the respective products’ time to market at a higher level of quality and lower total expense.

 

Since there are so many new applications to test in a very compressed timeframe, operator system integration and test teams use the Mu Test Suite to impersonate third-party devices/systems in order to avoid expensive multi-vendor lab build out,” Kresse said, adding that the new enhancements were a response to customers asking for a product that focused on multiple aspects of testing.

 

To date 80 percent of Mu’s business is in the telecom and mobile vendor-carrier ecosystem, but the company is starting to gain custmoers in the smart-grid space  (like ABB) and in the cloud space (like Genesys (News - Alert), a division of Alcatel Lucent). The company also has six vendors and operators on its advisory board, including AT&T, Verizon, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent and Cox (News - Alert).