While businesses increasingly recognizing the importance of testing software for security faults and performance issues before actual product deployment, companies like  Mu Dynamics are testing embedded software in a wide variety of networked equipment types including telecommunications.

 

Of course, the costs of solving these problems within the production environment can be prohibitive, and as more and more service disruptions from these failures occur company’s are stepping eradicate the issue.

 

These are among several of the reasons IDC (News - Alert), and independent research firm, has tapped Mu Dynamics as a company to watch.

Mu Dynamics helps network operators and their diverse product suppliers build and operate higher quality, more reliable and robust networks that have minimal downtime.  Operators need their revenue-critical next-gen IP services to be robust, available and secure to ensure minimal customer churn and costly downtime issues.

 

Initially, the company was created to proactively eliminate the high cost of service, application, and network downtime for network operators and their vendors. Mu’s solution automates a systematic and repeatable process that identifies hard-to-detect sources of potential downtime within IP services, applications, and underlying networks, says the IDC vendor profile.

 

The profile, which analyzes Mu Dynamics, reviewed the outfits market potential, technology/solution, corporate strategy, force multipliers, and customers and noted: The security of networks is increasingly critical and unproven, especially as telecom networks shift to IP-based networks; and compared with open source tools in the "fuzzing" area, Mu offers automation, faster performance, and better reporting.

 

According to IDC,  Mu’s offering covers the world wide application vulnerability assessment software space estimated to total $110 million in 2006. From 2006 to 2011, IDC forecasts a 33 percent CAGR for this market.

 

“If Mu remains independent, we would expect significant growth. If it acquires other testing tools and expands into performance management, Mu could grow into a sizable systems and security management company. However, there will always be the temptation to sell the company to a larger vendor,” the study says.

 

In addition, the disruption in the market sees Mu in a unique position to take Advantage, while service providers and enterprises are moving to IP services and

applications to leverage the cost, speed, and flexibility advantages that IP has to offer, according to IDC.

 

However, the challenge Mu is facing is that IP is inherently more complex and more fragile than their prior infrastructures. This shift is resulting in the market disruption opportunity for Mu Dynamics. Existing solutions in the market are not able to ensure the level of reliability, availability, and security that service providers and enterprises demand for their IP services and applications. Mu’s unique solution is able to proactively provide a much higher level of service assurance for customers than other solutions on the market.

 

Mu has focused its product-development efforts around some rapidly growing market spaces. IP multimedia services (IMS) is a major telco trend, and Mu wrote the

benchmark paper IMS Forum (News - Alert) Reliability and Availability Analysis. Mu also has driven SIPit event interoperability events including VoIP applications and software testing for this developing market. Likewise, VoIP and Internet protocol television (IPTV (News - Alert)) are also

new telecommunications services for which Mu customers depend upon Mu-4000.

 

Since its inception in 2005, the Mu-4000 has evolved into a complete service assurance solution. The Mu-4000 Service Analyzer offers capabilities to improve reliability, availability and security of any IP-based network, with the constant addition of new features and functions to serve an active and growing customer base.

 

The appliance automates the ability to proactively analyze a network product or application for inherent weaknesses that cause unexpected application, service, or network downtime.

 

While some of these problems arise from increasingly complex IP infrastructure build out, others are due to known and unknown vulnerabilities. Mu offers three product modules: a service-level traffic variations module (dozens of families of protocol mutations), a published vulnerability module (Mu’s automated proactive service assurance identifies reliability, availability, and security issues to address, and characterizes product, application, or service quality), and a denial of service (DoS) module that comprises the stateless packet, the traffic pattern, and a service monitor used to characterize the effect on the service.