Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Psytechnics’ Experience Manager removes most significant barrier to large
scale adoption of Voice over IP

Ipswich, UK, 7th January 2007 - Voice and Video Performance Management specialist Psytechnics today announces the launch of its new Experience Manager software. Experience Manager provides Voice Performance Management capabilities that resolve the specific complexities of managing the quality of voice and video over IP networks. Psytechnics has developed a product with new features that will monitor, alert, troubleshoot and report on voice quality issues across multi-vendor VoIP networks.

Experience Manager encompasses a real-time view of voice quality issues, based on true user experience and actual call quality statistics. It tackles the complexity of voice by dealing with issues such as echo, delay, noise and incorrect speech levels that commonly plague VoIP deployments. It delivers targeted analytics and diagnostics to get to the root cause of the problem.

Psytechnics CEO, Anthony Finbow, comments: "As VoIP becomes integral to business communications, increasingly replacing existing fixed-line telephones, it is really important that companies can deliver the best possible caller satisfaction. Until now, there have been no real tools or systems for finding and fixing problems on a VoIP system. Voice Performance Management is an approach that is changing that, with more and more companies beginning to feel confident enough to migrate all employees to VoIP".

Experience Manager features

Monitoring
Real time, passive monitoring is used at key points across the network. Calls are analysed and assessed non-disruptively. Experience Manager uses specially developed deep packet inspection technology to go beyond the IP headers. It looks inside the voice streams, monitoring IP header, Listening Quality (LQ) and Conversational Quality (CQ). Only by looking into the payload of packets can issues such as echo, noise and incorrect volume levels be correctly identified. This view of the voice traffic is vital and in most cases is the only real view.

Alerting
Monitoring provides the critical foundation for alerting. Voice performance issues are detected and appropriate alarms generated in real-time. Intelligent pre-processing is used to eliminate spurious alerts, preventing excessive alarms. The ability to alert on specific locations, workgroups and individuals is important for operational control, based on Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). Alerting is based on configurable threshold and recurrence levels enabling it to map directly to operational requirements. Alerting provides the essential insight for efficient and effective troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting
With just a few clicks on the web-based user interface, a non-expert user can pin-point voice performance issues and resolve them. Multiple views and filters provide the ability to quickly drill down and visual indicators highlight the root cause of problems at a glance. This rapid resolution reduces the mean-time to repair (MTTR) and minimises the impact of voice quality issues on the business, even identifying problems before users notice.

Reporting
Experience Manager provides a powerful reporting capability across all of the functional areas of monitoring, alerting and trouble shooting. Historical trend analysis and flexible MOS performance reporting for voice traffic, location and device is available. This functionality creates the ability to provide SLA reports that are meaningful to the business by demonstrating actual voice performance in quantitative terms. This empowers the customer for discussions with vendors, service providers and users about operational performance.

Experience Manager runs on industry standard hardware running Linux and is comprised of an Experience Server, which usually sits on the network operations centre (NOC) with Experience Engines, designed to monitor individual calls, located at key points across the VoIP network. The product also offers pre-deployment and out of hours testing, meaning that for a business planning to roll out VoIP it is possible to make sure the system is running at optimal levels before full deployment.