Trinagy from NSS delivers carrier-class Voice over IP performance management

Network Support Services (NSS) has announced Voice over IP (VoIP) network support to the Trinagy carrier-class performance management solution for Cisco service providers and enterprises. This means these enterprises can deliver optimal VoIP services and provides the critical link into their business and operational management systems.

"Trinagy has been long provided performance management for service providers using Cisco`s data networking gear; it is now adding VoIP capabilities to the product line," says Andre Odendaal, Managing Director of NSS which represents Trinagy in South Africa.

Trinagy has also announced that it has achieved "go to market" status in the Cisco Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem Partner program.

"A key challenge facing VoIP service providers and enterprises, is to create the business infrastructure needed to deliver VoIP services," says Odendaal.

"VoIP providers need fundamental tools to monitor and analyse call information to identify traffic patterns and support capacity planning and network engineering. Timely, accurate statistics such as call duration, dropped calls, bad connections, and call volume are critical to operate a reliable voice network. These are the issues that Trinagy and Cisco address with this new product," Odendaal adds.

According to him, providers also need to complete the business process by linking this data into their billing, customer care and provisioning support systems.

"In short, providers need to deliver the same level of service quality for voice services provided over an IP network as customers receive for traditional voice networks," Odendaal says.

Since becoming a member of the Cisco Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program, Trinagy has worked with Cisco`s Voice Technology Centre to meet this challenge and to develop a robust VoIP performance management solution that best addresses the needs of companies deploying VoIP services, from single site enterprises to multi-tiered, complex carrier networks.

"Tools such as performance management are essential to the successful adoption of VoIP, and that is why we asked Trinagy to add VoIP support in their product," said Alistair Woodman, director of marketing, Voice Technology Center at Cisco.

"Through our collaboration with Trinagy, we are delivering a robust solution to our service provider customers."

Adds Steve Mank, Trinagy`s senior vice president, product operations: "We`re pleased Cisco saw Trinagy`s long-standing heritage in the performance management market as the key to offering a management solution to its Voice over IP customers."

"We are coupling our traditional strengths in performance and service level management solutions for the world`s largest service providers with VoIP-specific capabilities, such as call correlation, call metrics and voice quality data, to bring out the business value of VoIP networks."

The Cisco Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem is a community of technology and deployment companies enabling service providers to rapidly deploy innovative networking services.

Cisco and its partners offer a wide range of solutions for Packet Telephony, Voice Applications, OSS/BSS, Broadband Access and Solution Integration/Deployment. Cisco Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem partners support open, standards-based architectures and a shared commitment to interoperable, multi-vendor solutions. Membership in the Cisco Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem is offered to companies that demonstrate leading-edge capabilities and present mutual business opportunities.

Insight for VoIP Manages All Aspects of Cisco VoIP Calls Trinagy`s Insight for VoIP(tm) solution, the newest member of Trinagy`s Insight Plus(tm) performance management family, provides the only fully correlated, end-to-end solution to effectively manage VoIP calls within a Cisco environment.

Dynamic call set-up and routing in an IP environment has made the task of mapping individual call legs into complete, end-to-end calls almost impossible.

Accurately combining these call legs into a single, end-to-end call is a necessity for service providers and enterprises to provision services, measure VoIP Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and bill customers based on predefined tariffs.

With its robust correlation engine, Insight for VoIP accurately maps discrete customer calls with all associated call legs, facilitating accurate client billing.

At the same time, carriers and enterprises can examine individual call legs to proactively manage capacity and optimize the overall performance of their VoIP services.

Insight for VoIP provides reports on all major call detail metrics, such as call duration, total call minutes, and call volumes. It tracks call success rates and call seizure rates and provides comparisons of regional, national and international activity.

Insight for VoIP also measures performance by type of call (i.e., voice or fax) and reports on a host of quality of service (QoS) parameters including round trip delay, Icpif, lost, late and early packets, QoV trap counts, and QoS settings to help providers optimize voice quality.

Its built-in forecast capability identifies trends and can spot potential issues before client service is disrupted. TREND(r), Insight for VoIP`s underlying engine, allows service providers to determine what type, amount and frequency of data to collect; collection, aging, and reporting of data are fully customizable.

TREND`s sophisticated grouping capabilities package this information in any combination consistent with actual business requirements - by geography, operation centres, corporate customers, cost centres, individual users, etc.

Trinagy`s Insight for VoIP solution is modular and scalable. It can manage a single location or easily expand to address changing requirements, allowing regional- and network-wide reporting using a hierarchical, tiered design. And, because no polling of devices is involved, there is minimal management overhead on the VoIP network.

Trinagy`s Insight Plus Family Trinagy`s Insight Plus family includes Insight for VoIP, Insight for Dial Access, Insight for Applications, Insight for QoS, Insight for Networks and Insight for Broadband.

Each solution consists of service-specific packaged and customisable reports, data collection software, and TREND, Trinagy`s performance management platform.

Every Trinagy solution provides intelligent insight into service providers` and large enterprises` specific value-added services and networks to enable them to meet their current SLAs, manage their networking infrastructure performance, and plan for future revenue-generating service offerings.