Dave Kresse, CEO of Mu Dynamics, recently took time with TMCnet to reflect on the company’s accomplishments this past year and what is coming in 2009.

 

Mu Dynamic’s analysis solutions are designed to improve the reliability and uptime of networked products and IP business services by proactively addressing robustness and resiliency factors before systems are deployed in production environments. 

 

As networks have become more essential to the operation of businesses worldwide, they are becoming more complex.  Mu Dynamics helps addresses these issues and more including increased functionality that drives complexity and makes it harder to manage, less robust or resilient, and contain an increasing number of security vulnerabilities.

 

Looking back at 2008, how would you characterize the year for your company?

A year of significant new Network Operator and Vendor customer acquisition, increased breadth and depth of existing customer usage for more reliable VoIP and IPTV (News - Alert) deployments, and product capability expansion.

 

What were the key trends that impacted your business?

 

Complexity involved in VoIP, IPTV service roll outs and upgrades as well as development efforts by vendors supporting these services.

 

What was your company’s biggest achievement in the past year?

 

Landing key business at the majority of the top 10 leading global network operators as well as their ecosystem of varied product suppliers – from hardware to software to semiconductor vendors.

 

What are your customers looking for in the coming year?

 

More stateful testing to ensure fewer field fire drills, fewer costly downtime incidents and higher quality products for real time service offerings involving VoIP and other NGN service offerings.

 

What can we expect to see from your company in the next 12 months?

 

Mu will be increasingly viewed as a strategic provider for the largest network operators, government organizations, and vendors who want to ensure that their services and products are reliable, available and secure.  We will also expand our automation capabilities to work with customers on their unique and sometime proprietary testing requirements. In addition, we will continue to focus on customized automation, integration, and ease of use so customers easily realize the value we provide within their existing processes. 

 

Do you think a new administration in Washington, D.C. will be good for the communications industry? If so, how? If not, why not?

 

Yes, I believe the overall communications ecosystem (both operators and vendors) will benefit from the new administration.   President-elect Obama is for net neutrality (http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/#open-internet) and that stance protects the openness of networking/internet/operators. This openness brings huge benefits, but also ensures that the complexity of operator environments will continue to rise as more components and capabilities are added to this growing global network. Ensuring that real time services operate as planned, regardless of the traffic they are exposed to or configuration changes that are made on the network or device, is Mu’s core mission.

 

In your view, please describe the future of your market?

 

Our operator customers are increasingly working towards leveraging a common network for all IP services. Because of this, a single failure or weakness is often devastating to their operations, impacting service quality and customer satisfaction. Many are deploying a mix of triple and quad-play service bundles in the increasingly competitive business and consumer service markets. Vendors have similar issues since their software and hardware products are responsible for operator service/content delivery networks. Bringing higher quality services and products to market more quickly is becoming the primary driver for the success of a company within the Network Operator ecosystem

 

If you had to make one bold prediction for 2009, what would it be?

 

Mu predicts that both Cable and Service Provider Operators and their vendors will heavily innovate around bundled services in 2009 - both business and consumer service offerings. Technical innovation and the ability to provision reliable and secure real-time applications across any network will be increasingly a business differentiator for both small and large businesses. Particularly in the tough economic climate facing everyone in 2009, those operators and vendors who are not innovating rapidly will end up paying for it in the form of lost market share and resulting revenue decline in a more dramatic manner than previously seen.