Spirent

Analyst Coverage :

Paul Bevan

Spirent Communications provides network equipment testing and network service assurance products and services to all the world’s major Communications Service Providers (CSPs).

Spirent can automate functional test processes on networks and network equipment using its Velocity solution, and the results can be dramatic, as demonstrated by what happened at US based CSP, Calix. There, Velocity helped Calix reduce complex network test set-ups from 50 hours to 10 minutes…a 300x improvement. The time savings can be translated into a saving on the number of test engineers required by a factor of between 3 to 1 and 10 to 1.

Under old manual test processes Spirent found that labs with, say 200 servers, were leaving them all the time even though their actual usage could be as low as 10%. The automatic scheduling of tests in Velocity and the rapid automated cleaning of systems between tests enabled servers, linked to Velocity, to be automatically turned on and off as required.

In keeping with the move to the cloud, Spirent offer testing-as-a-service solutions and a range of other support and professional services packages, delivered globally with the help of an extensive partner network. At the same time, its Service Assurance solution has had to keep abreast of DevOps Continuous Development, Continuous Testing, Continuous Implementation and Integration methodologies in a more layered and complex software-defined, containerised environment.