EXFO Inc. has joined the Network Intelligence Alliance (NI Alliance), a new industry organization created for collaboration among the Network Economy's technology providers. By participating in the NI Alliance, EXFO wants to help build and market innovative solutions for customers seeking to improve network service assurance.
In today's Network Economy – a world that now depends and runs on networks – accurate visibility and precise tracking of data crossing networks have become crucial to the availability, performance and quality of applications and services. The growing complexity of IP transactions, the explosion of mobile applications, and the mainstream adoption of cloud computing surpass the capabilities of conventional tools to improve how networks operate, expand services and police illicit or criminal activity. Just like business intelligence solutions emerged to unlock information hidden in the enterprise, network intelligence is an emerging category of technology to reveal the critical details of the data locked inside network traffic and transactions.
The NI Alliance serves two purposes: first, as a forum for collaboration among technology providers whose solutions secure data in transit, ensure efficient data delivery, monetize data transactions or track real-time information. Through the NI Alliance, members can better serve their customers. The NI Alliance also seeks to educate the market and the public on the role and value of network intelligence in protecting sensitive information; delivering value-added services, applications and information; and ensuring better performance of network-dependent solutions.
EXFO includes network intelligence within its Brix System solutions that it says proactively monitor IP service and application quality. Network operators use the Brix System to guarantee the successful launch and ongoing, profitable operation of their various IP services. EXFO's BrixMobile service assurance solution also features a highly scalable packet core monitoring engine which allows deep packet inspection (DPI) of traffic in real time, thus allowing operators to accurately classify each user's traffic by application. This allows providers to enable subscriber-based, application-level quality monitoring on their mobile networks.
"EXFO is a valuable addition to the NI Alliance and we welcome their participation," said Erik Larsson, chairman of the NI Alliance. "The NI Alliance is about collaborative innovation with companies like EXFO who play a leadership role in the test, measurement and service assurance markets. Working with other NI Alliance members, EXFO's customers will be able to more effectively leverage network intelligence to better manage, protect and profit from their data networks."
Establishment of the NI Alliance was initiated by Qosmos, whose network intelligence technology components provide the crucial first step in understanding what's passing through networks. Qosmos says its hardware and software components extract and interpret real-time traffic, translating a data stream's 1s and 0s into their respective communications protocols, metadata and content for use by third-party applications.
