The most important asset to any service provider is the network, be it cloud, mobile, or anything else. To keep a network running smoothly, administrators must remain informed and on top of all issues that may arise and MATE Live provides the means necessary to do so.

Al Sardella, Cariden's VP of product marketing, says that before MATE, no "adequate analytics tools [existed] to operate today’s service provider networks." Available tools "are/were slow and inflexible," and did not give users access to the type of data they required. Custom solutions to this difficulty "were expensive and difficult to maintain," according to Sardella.

Built off of their pre-existing platform, MATE Collector, MATE Live does everything its predecessor did, but it also adding new and crucial programs: MATE Design allows users to manage and plan traffic; MATE Collector also automates data recovery.

Dorian Kim, Vice President of IP Engineering at NTT America (News - Alert) says the MATE suite is useful for "planning, engineering, and operations tasks." NTT uses MATE software to "monitor network utilization, improve uptime, perform future trending analysis, and ensure network health, all from a single application." Having witnessed how intuitive and powerful the software is, Kim says the company plans to apply for "multiple departments within our technical operations" soon.

Investing in the software suite will bring many times its initial purchase by helping administrator to understand the nuts and bolts of their system and reducing your network's total outage time.

• Planners can use MATE Design to project future requirements of the network by looking at how traffic flows between various sites.

• Designers and Engineers can use the suite to assist in figuring out whether or not MPLS paths run as efficiently as possible in addition to when and why they need to re-route.

• Peering Coordinators can use MATE in order to keep a steady balance of traffic

• Business Managers can use the suite in order to assess the impact of a new service introduced on the network

The suite grants users access to data, both current and backlogged, and can convert it into useful information that influences countless decision making processes.