EXFO + Astellia – Walking the talk of end-to-end solutions for 5G and virtual network service assurance
The communications landscape is going through an unprecedented upheaval fueled by demand for exceptional subscriber experience. Service and network transformations, driven by the move toward 5G and the push for fiber everywhere, are forcing service providers of all kinds to reinvent who they are. These service providers are counting on their vendors to accelerate their transformations.
From the core through the tower to the subscriber
EXFO recently completed the fourth in a series of acquisitions intended to transform our test, monitoring and analytics solutions to even better support digital service providers. Building on our foundation as the global leader in optical testing and test automation, the acquisition of Astellia greatly enhances EXFO’s position in 5G RAN optimization, network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments and customer experience management. Combining Astellia’s strengths in passive probing and customer experience-focused analytics with EXFO’s strengths in active probing, real-time network analytics as well as real-time topology and inventory discovery, creates the industry’s most complete network, service and subscriber management solution.
Walking the talk of end-to-end solutions
When describing a solution as end-to-end (E2E), it’s important to understand exactly what we’re talking about. Often the term “E2E” is used to describe one of the following:
- From core to customer, or edge to edge depending on the service
- From network layers 0 to 7
- From development lab to live in the network
By combining Astellia’s solutions with EXFO’s, including the recent acquisition of Ontology for real-time network discovery and active inventory, we deliver the most complete set of truly end-to-end solutions:
- Assurance and analytics solutions that eliminate blind spots, providing 100% network, service and subscriber visibility, from core to edge
- The most intelligent test and monitoring solutions, spanning layers 0 through 7
- Test solutions that cover the full development process, lab to live, and prepare network infrastructure for new services and additional traffic.
Boosting ROI with professional services
As our customers continue to transform and virtualize their networks, and as they introduce network technology solutions, such as 5G, IoT and the big-data analytics solutions required to support the anticipated scale-out, the critical skill sets required to plan, build, operate and optimize these solutions may not be readily available. Vendors that can provide professional services to help their operators through these transformations can help reduce the risk and speed up the time to adoption, and provide access to best-in-breed processes and solutions.
The Astellia acquisition brings to EXFO a seasoned professional services team of more than 200 experts with more than 5,200 successfully completed audits and consulting engagements focused on network optimization and customer experience management, throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Our professional services team supports the goals of operators looking to optimize their networks; migrate from a network operations center model to a service operations center model; better understand their customers’ usage patterns to minimize the risk of churn; or simply explore new ways to leverage data to drive operations and generate additional revenues.
Even stronger global presence
As enterprise services, and the networks that support them, continue to become more global in nature, it is essential that EXFO have a global presence and scale to match. With the acquisition of Astellia, EXFO continues to expand its geographic and customer base, primarily in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. With very little overlap, we are now in a much better position to offer this new customer base an expanded solution portfolio, covering everything from network simulators to advanced optical test and measurement equipment to one of the most complete service assurance portfolios.
Rounding out the complete solution set
In short, the combination of EXFO’s and Astellia’s solutions and professional services puts EXFO in the unique position of being one of the few test, measurement and analytics vendors that can claim a true end-to-end portfolio—lab to live, layers 0 to 7 and core to customer.
By augmenting EXFO’s leadership position in test and measurement solutions along with our world-class simulator solution and real-time network analytics, the combined EXFO-Astellia portfolio truly makes EXFO the test, monitoring and analytics experts the communications industry counts on.
