Looking at a half-billion dollar increase in the size of the service assurance market over the next three years and a network increasing in complexity due to convergence, network management and diagnostics provider Tektronix introduced the latest from its next-generation unified assurance platform this week at NXTcomm. Known as Unified Assurance for Converged Networks (UACN), the platform provides end-to-end service level views for all user sessions across various multiple access and core network technologies.

Tektronix’s UACN platform initially will focus on voice services delivered over IP networks. Keith Cobler, marketing manager for the network monitoring product line at Tektronix, said that as customers evolved, the platform would evolve with them and support video and data services as well.

“With convergence, operators are beginning to focus more on the end user quality of experience,” Cobbler said. “They want to get closer and closer to the revenue stream, which is their users.”

The overall service assurance market is approximately $2.2 billion this year, according to research by OSS Observer; it is expected to reach $2.38 billion next year and more than $2.8 billion by 2010. Tektronix already is getting a portion of that revenue and will use this new platform to build on its voice-over-IP performance management solutions.

The UACN provides real-time visibility into service performance, customer quality of experience and customer response to new services. The platform’s Orion Service Assurance for Voice Services will enable operators the ability to measure the performance of their voice services as well as determine uptake rates, failure rates and performance trends over time for specific target markets and sub-markets. It includes a number of impact analysis tools that show operators how a new service affects customers.

“We’re shifting up toward the service level so this is a big release for us,” Cobler said. The UACN is different from the company’s—and other companies’—monitoring systems in that it supports the real-time informational needs and business processes for multiple departments within the network operator’s enterprise, including operations, network planning and engineering, marketing and sales.

The system is modular and one of the new components is the Interconnect Services module. It allows a user extended visibility of voice service performance for calls that transit into or out of the operator’s network over IP next-generation networks. The Interconnect Services module is designed to monitor and manage services handed off between interconnect partners and key wholesale customers and provides quantitative reporting over those connections.

Other features of the new platform include proactive traffic monitoring; the ability to assess route quality filtered by country code, region and carrier; the ability to identify least-cost routing; and analyze service and network problems.

“We are just on the cusp as a strategy shift from an individual element perspective to a service perspective,” Cobler said. “As traditional circuit-switched networks are replaced with media gateways and routers, and everything goes to IP, it forces network operators to look at things from a service perspective, and this is an evolution of that strategy.”