Testing for the Unexpected (part 2 of 2)
by Dave Kresse on 02 June 2009 - 11:34:08 AM
Continued from last week...
I started noticing several interesting trends in our customers about six months ago, and it really hit home when I spoke at the NAB show on IPTV testing a couple of weeks back.
First, the move to converged service offerings is accelerating. The complexity and breadth of these NGN services are growing rapidly as well. And I am amazed by the pace of innovation I am seeing from Operators and Vendors around IPTV and 4G/LTE mobile. The entire network operator ecosystem is moving quickly through a significant industry transition to converged services and applications – far faster than I expected.
Second, Operators and Vendors are realizing the breadth and depth of the challenge in ensuring that products and services stay up and available within these increasingly complex environments. However, there is still a mixed bag on the level of operator and vendor sophistication regarding the specifics of the challenge and how best to solve it. I heard one vendor tout the reliability of their specific solution without any mention of how they ensured their solution would “play well” with the 10 other solutions that all need to work well in an IPTV implementation to achieve a good customer experience. There have been other discussions I have had as well with vendors and operators that continue to believe that product quality is something that can be evaluated and controlled with the “4 walls” of a given product. Our experience shows this to be untrue.
The good news is that more and more operators and vendors, many of them our customers, understand that the challenge lies in a given software or hardware product being just a single star within a large, complex galaxy of multiple vendor products. That testing is no longer about how resilient you are as a standalone solution, but instead is about how well you will hold up in the unexpected inputs that are all too common within a complex IP network. Even with this mix of sophistication, the good news is that reliability is now a core part of the discussion. Only with guarantees of reliable, available services will customers adopt at the pace of the industry’s innovation.
Finally, the concept of testing for the unexpected is quickly becoming a best practice within the industry. At NAB and at more than half of the customer meetings and demonstrations Mu has led in the past six months, people are asking for automated, systematic solutions allowing them to test for the unexpected. This is a HUGE change from just 18 months ago. I find myself and our team evangelizing less and less, and spending more time with prospects talking about how to seamlessly integrate into their existing customer processes (commercial, homegrown and proprietary at times). Customers want to know how quickly they will be up and running (quick time to test is a huge focus for us internally). Finally, they want us to share pre-defined test methodologies and best practices from our leading edge customers we’ve worked with closely for years.
Our customers are helping Mu reach a new and quite different stage in the evolution of our industry - broader customer acceptance, accelerating growth, and higher expectations from 100+ customer installations. I know our team will always miss the early, evangelical days, but we are having a lot of fun right now working with industry leading customers to ensure that the next wave of innovative products and services arrive with the high degree of reliability that end user customers now expect in their converged IP applications and services.
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