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Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award Recognizes Empirix' Leadership in VoIP Test Equipment Markets for Fourth Consecutive Year

Posted on: Tuesday, 12 July 2005, 12:00 CDT

Based on its recent analysis, World VoIP Test Equipment Markets, Frost & Sullivan has selected Empirix Inc. as the recipient of its 2005 Market Leadership Award, for maintaining its leadership across the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) testing markets through innovation and the expansion of its product line. Empirix has been the recipient of this award for the past four consecutive years. The company ranked first in global VoIP test equipment market share during the 2004 analysis period, based on significant growth across the equipment manufacturer, service provider and enterprise segments.

Each year, this award recognizes the company that has achieved leading market share within its industry segment. Empirix, with its well-known Hammer(TM) portfolio of products and services, has demonstrated strategic excellence in product innovation, marketing, and sales strategies, resulting in the largest gain in market share in this segment over the past two years.

"Despite the entrance of many companies into the VoIP test equipment space, Empirix' revenues enjoyed a healthy growth of 67.6 percent from 2003 to 2004, clearly outperforming the average market growth of 32 percent," say Frost & Sullivan Research Analysts Olga Yashkova and Sankara Jambulingam.

Empirix' product portfolio covers the full range of test elements for the entire product lifecycle. Key Empirix products include the Hammer Call Analyzer for troubleshooting of enhanced IP services, the Hammer FX for desktop through installation functional and feature testing, the Hammer NXT for ultra-high density load testing, and the Hammer XMS for carrier-scale network and service monitoring.

Empirix' strength has historically been in the lab environment, serving the needs of network equipment manufacturers, such as Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Fujitsu, Avaya, Alcatel, Lucent Technologies, and Siemens, as well as addressing the demand from service provider and carrier labs. As the market has grown and matured, Empirix has expanded its market focus to include installation and maintenance (I&M), lab-based and onsite test services, and service monitoring. The company introduced the Hammer XMS in December 2004 in anticipation of the migration of VoIP from out-of-service lab assessment to deployed services.

"The Hammer XMS is an integrated analysis system designed to ensure the reliability and quality of VoIP network services as well as speed up troubleshooting," says Yashkova. "The Hammer XMS 1.2 introduced in May 2005 offers additional historical trend analysis of network metrics and statistical distribution analysis to discover and diagnose intermittent or persistent performance problems, at line rate, across signaling and media, and with an architecture that meets the needs of the largest cable MSO and service provider deployments."

In addition, Empirix continues to expand the Hammer portfolio beyond VoIP, to enhanced IP services and the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) requirements of fax, voice, video and other session-based, media-rich applications and services. Empirix now offers Hammer-based VoIP testing products and services for the enterprise market.

Besides infrastructure and application level testing and troubleshooting in pre- and post-deployment environments, Empirix seeks to expand its partnership with installed and prospective customers. Empirix actively initiates free educational seminars and conferences for existing and potential customers. Empirix has sponsored webinars, such as Lightreading's "VoIP Testers," conferences with Telephony magazine, and is active in industry conferences, including Pulver.com/VON and key interoperability forums and organizations.

The reduction of capital and operational expenditures in the communications and related test and measurement industry after the downturn in 2001 has drastically affected the availability of trained staff. Empirix identified this need and responded by acquiring CT Labs at the beginning of 2005. This was a natural extension of the close professional and working relationship that existed between the two companies since the establishment of the latter.

CT Labs offers Empirix new resources to expand the expertise and infrastructure available to the industry for world-class, state-of-the-art VoIP testing. The company is a recognized pioneer in the development and execution of VoIP and TDM-related tests to validate and assess network elements and networks, and has been selected to conduct numerous private and public tests spanning PBXs, gateways, softswitches, border controllers, phones, firewalls, media servers, IVR and voice portals.

"CT Labs will also provide expertise to Empirix to assist in the development of advanced solutions for VoIP testing and monitoring, particularly in the areas of test automation and test suite creation for its portfolio of Hammer test platforms," notes Jambulingam.

Overall, Empirix has made significant strides in the VoIP test equipment market in 2004-2005 that have enabled it to maintain its market leadership for four years in a row. As a result, Empirix is the worthy recipient of the 2005 Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Leadership in the world VoIP test and measurement market.

About Empirix, Inc.

Empirix delivers a comprehensive range of testing and monitoring solutions that assure the performance of next-generation networks, contact centers and Web-based applications. Spanning TDM, IP and IMS network architectures, Empirix provides products, services and support to thousands of customers worldwide, including Global 2000 enterprises, network equipment manufacturers and service providers. Headquartered in Bedford, Mass., Empirix is a privately held company, with offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.empirix.com or call 1-866-EMPIRIX.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit http://www.frost.com.

The Hammer Call Analyzer

VoIP Troubleshooting and Enhanced IP Services Analysis

The Hammer Call Analyzer (HCA) enables users to visualize signaling and voice quality problems in VoIP networks. The unique multi-stage call flow display walks users through a particular call. The comprehensive media analysis tools enable users to quickly visualize and diagnose media problems. The Hammer Call Analyzer goes beyond simply protocol analyzing by not only finding a problem, but also decoding the packet and analyzing the identified problem further, to make it easier for an application engineer to fix it. Spanning voice signaling, media, fax, and a wide array of patent-pending visualization and troubleshooting methods, the HCA is regarded as one of the most easy-to-use and useful tools for any engineer who gets "hands on" with VoIP. Recent extensions include T.38 Fax over IP, Cisco's Skinny/SCCP signaling, multi-leg call association and visualization, expanded voice quality and echo measurements.

The Hammer FX

Developer's Desktop and System Test Rackmount NGN/IMS Application and Feature Test Platform

The Hammer FX is a TDM/IP feature test platform, which is tuned to focus on functional simulations and diagnostics of the latest demands from the industry. Based upon an Empirix implemented state-machine architecture that lends itself to flexibility and malleability to vendor requirements, call flows, media extensions and vendor interpretations of specifications, the Hammer FX is a functional test platform. NEMs and service providers need the assurance that the quality and reliability of the applications are maintained so the end-users will justify their investment in next-generation applications. Empirix' Hammer FX addresses the above challenge and provides a complete feature testing system for VoIP applications, IMS core and edge element diagnostics, and CLASS feature testing at the service and applications layer. Recent extensions to the Hammer FX include a CLASS VoIP automation test environment known as the Hammer Suite Studio. Active product extensions to the Hammer FX have seen the product used in a multitude of environments from VoIP-only, PacketCable, VoWiFi, Fax, TDM/IP interworking, CLASS-5 application and feature testing, through mobile video trials.

The Hammer NXT

Ultra-High Density Load, Stress and QA/Regression Bulk Call Generation

The Hammer NXT is an ultra-high density test platform for stressing, benchmarking and QA testing of today's carrier-class converged communications infrastructure. As a result of the highest densities across TDM and IP, signaling and media, with scenarios scaling over 100,000 endpoints, it is capable of hundreds of calls/sec to fully characterize such elements as softswitches, gateways, session border controllers, and media servers to name just a few applications. To address the high demands of density, performance and test coverage of TDM and IP, Empirix offers a load testing platform known as the Hammer NXT. Empirix' NXT addresses this particular challenge and provides an integrated and scalable test platform. This product provides high-density path confirmation and voice quality testing of IP telephony applications including TDM-TDM, IP-TDM, and TDM-IP. The Hammer NXT provides the ability to test media gateways in end-to-end or isolated test scenarios, verify maximum call rates, verify media path confirmation, and measure voice quality under load or with real world network impairments.

The Hammer XMS

Network and Service Monitoring: Service Diagnostics and Network Performance Management

The Hammer XMS (XoIP Monitoring System) is an integrated analysis system designed to ensure the reliability and quality of next generation services, speed troubleshooting, and help VoIP service providers care for their valuable customers.

In essence, the system monitors live carrier class VoIP networks and provides signaling and media quality data on every call, all the time. Service providers can keep an eye on high-level network metrics via integration with their existing Network Management Systems or can drill into the details of any call down to individual protocol message through a simple web-based query interface. Launched publicly at Fall VON 2004, recent announcements include several Cable MSO and Carrier deployments, a partnership with Micromuse on fault management, and product enhancements in release 1.2 to the Hammer XMS which provides new applications for network analysis and system administration, added flexibility in network data aggregation, new H.323 and improved ISUP support and a variety of other customer-inspired improvements.

The Hammer VQTS

The Industry-Standardized Voice Quality Test Suite from Hammer

It is a software-based solution that provides wide scalability for voice quality testing of next-generation networks and components. The Hammer NetEm is used in conjunction with the VQTS to simulate negative network fault conditions, deterministic network scenarios, and boundary conditions. Both of these applications are used to link network conditions and voice quality at the service and application level, essentially to characterize the quality of customer experience.

The Hammer NetEm

IP and VoIP Network Simulator and Impairment Generator

The Hammer PacketSphere is used for enterprise and carrier-class applications in IP and VoIP environments. The Network Emulator Application, or the "NetEm," is a test system that can emulate all the key impairments in the next generation networks, latency, jitter, lost packets, re-ordered packets, re-routed packets, duplicate packets and bandwidth restrictions. This product is used by end-users such as service providers and carriers (SP&C) and network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) to simulate their networks to test their components and devices accordingly. Out-of-service simulation of disaster recovery scenarios for Storage, VoIP and IP-centric communications and in-service impairments of sessions/flows are the primary applications for the Hammer NetEm. Recent extensions include a higher density, lower cost per port platform, known as the NetEm XG.

CT Labs Testing Services

A Focused Testing Services Organization on IP Telephony, NGN and Converged Networks

CT Labs is a unique full-service testing lab with a focus on converged communications products in the enterprise and carrier deployments of Voice over IP over Anything. CT Labs can handle all aspects of product testing, from the creation of custom test scripts, to running the tests, interpreting the test results, and issuing product recommendations where improvements are desired. Testing solutions include functional testing, regression test offload, performance testing, competitive assessment and interoperability, standards-compliance and load/stress benchmarking.

Source: Business Wire

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