Anritsu takes an active role in service assurance

As data becomes increasingly important to service assurance, Anritsu is looking to take a more active role in providing data that can help the network to operate. The company elaborated in an interview at the recent TM Forum Live event.
RCR Wireless News: Service assurance at this year’s show has been a big topic, how do you see service assurance evolving over the next 12 to 18 months?
Neil Tomlinson, Anritsu: It’s a very interesting area if you look at the analysts and the way that they segment the market. There are a lot of different functions; in terms of historic views of service assurance and of network management those functions were very appropriate to the business models that they had. As the market evolves, as the technology goes to LTE, to VoLTE to more IP; it’s becoming more of a data-centric world, and the tool sets that they have, the market segmentation they have for productizing the management of the network becomes less modular and much more centric. So I see our position in this moving from a passive probe data acquisition space, more into an active element of the network, and we are certainly seeing ourselves as a more strategic component of the virtualized network, of the [self-optimized network] for optimization or policy a bit, so a pure data play, providing data and information that enables the network to operate, at the same time providing feeds for systems that are fault management, maybe, or performance and certainly in optimization as well, providing all that data so that people can work on it. So I see a consolidation in this space of some of the previously segmented functions in service assurance.