In an ever-changing connected world, new devices, standards, cross-industry applications, and infrastructure equipment are rolled-out almost monthly. This trend has led to the rising importance of testing – and for improving the odds of a new product’s commercial success.

The advent of cloud technologies has opened up new opportunities for companies to not only store data or move their infrastructure, but to also achieve greater efficiencies by testing network operations and interoperability. There are four major trends driving the growth of the connected world, according to technology services company Aricent (News - Alert).

1. User experience trumps functionality: Customers are demanding more intuitive, personalized, seamless, and meaningful experiences from all types of products and services.
2. More and smarter devices: The number of personal devices is growing, and the “Internet of Things” is becoming a reality. An increasing number of devices get connected to devices, and more devices get connected to the grid. More powerful and capable devices go hand-in-hand with sophisticated applications that create rich user experiences and new business opportunities.
3. Sophisticated and data-rich applications: More sophisticated and data-rich applications are spawning new product categories and placing new demands on networks.
4. Need for robust network and infrastructure: Communication networks must support an increasingly diverse array of uses, including rapidly growing trends such as machine-to-machine (M2M), which is expected to far surpass conventional phones in quantity of connected devices. In addition, mobile IP traffic is growing at over 90 percent each year, and overall global IP traffic is growing at four times that rate.

For telecom operators, testing methods and processes need to be constantly re-evaluated and updated to address today’s wide range of uses.

While it has become imperative to test for end-to-end network operation and broad interoperability, the costs of even functional testing are becoming prohibitively high, according to industry experts. As a result, equipment manufacturers are increasingly looking for innovative ideas to get the maximum bang for their buck; and cloud-based testing solutions are taking the lead.

In an upcoming webinar, experts from Aricent will identify the challenges in traditional telecom testing and justify the case for delivering testing competencies through the cloud.  They will investigate the limitations overcome by cloud-based testing and present the customer benefits derived from these solutions.