The testing industry has three major strategic development opportunities

Industrial networks, SDN, and LTE will be the three major strategic development opportunities for the future testing industry. These three areas are in a period of rapid development and the demand for testing is huge.

　　It is understood that Ixia has begun to focus on strengthening its investment in the financial and other industry network markets. Zhang Wei, general manager of Ixia China, said that Ixia has always been developing on the core capabilities of data testing. The coverage of the industry market in the past two years, including successful applications in the financial and other fields, has also extended Ixia's service coverage. It helps industry customers provide testing solutions in the fields of network reliability and security. In the past two years, Ixia has made strategic deployments in the operator market and the industry network market, and will invest more energy in these two markets. For industry network customers such as finance, the scale and complexity of data network applications are increasing, and their demand for IP testing will gradually emerge. Although they paid less attention to network testing in the past, as the scale of the network increases, the reliability, accuracy and timeliness of data transmission have an increasing impact on new businesses such as high-frequency trading, and they also pay more attention to network testing.

　　From the perspective of testing, the financial industry is more concerned about the reliability, timeliness and security of data. If there is a problem with financial data, it will have a great impact. This is also an area where Ixia is good at communication testing, including from routing and switching testing and network testing to application and security testing. In addition, there is a continuous monitoring process for the network environment. Ixia also has related "network visibility" solutions that can help it optimize the monitoring environment.

　　From the perspective of Ixia's global market, the network equipment manufacturer market accounts for the majority of its turnover. In the past two years, Ixia has focused its resource investment, including through corporate mergers and acquisitions and its own research and development, on the industrial network market to meet their testing needs. From the perspective of future development strategy, we hope that the industrial network market will maintain a balance with the manufacturer and operator markets and reach a considerable scale.

　　SDN has set off a global craze, and testing vendors such as Ixia have also participated in the SDN field. Zhang Wei, general manager of Ixia China, said that Ixia has been actively participating in SDN-related standard organizations. From a global perspective, Ixia is the chairman of the "Testing and Interoperability Group" of ONF, and is also a key member of the SDN testing group of the Indiana University InCNTRE Center. Ixia has been closely following SDN fields such as Open Flow. We have seen the changes that SDN has brought to the entire network. It is very forward-looking and has some revolutionary changes. The separation of the control plane and the data plane of the network makes the network very flexible. However, there are many standards, tests, and interoperability links in the actual application. Only after the standards are established can the network be extended outward and everyone can participate in it.

　　Currently, there are many different companies in the industry that implement SDN from different perspectives, which can be divided into three categories. First, implement SDN requirements and standards through software, such as Open vSwitch; second, add SDN to existing routers and switches through upgrades, and integrate SDN as a protocol; third, develop switches and controllers specifically for SDN, covering every type. Each model strives to adapt to different network environments and the extension of its own products.

　　Based on a deep understanding of SDN, Ixia has also launched targeted SDN solutions in the IxNetwork and IxANVL product suites. It is the only test solution in the industry that can simulate both controllers and switches, and is suitable for testing different SDN devices.

　　Judging from Ixia’s previous interoperability testing experience, many domestic and foreign manufacturers have begun to consider building SDN networks and how to evolve to SDN under the current network environment.

　　At present, the global LTE market has begun to rise in scale, and Chinese operators have also begun to deploy LTE networks on a large scale. Zhang Wei, general manager of Ixia China, said that from the perspective of Ixia's products, we are the only manufacturer in the industry that can achieve full end-to-end coverage testing of LTE. Our entire solution can not only cover each network element in the LTE network, but also test the entire system. For example, for base station testing, we can simulate thousands of access users and simulate all other devices associated with the base station to conduct surround testing on the base station. During the test, the base station load is increased and various application traffic is loaded to simulate the real application environment and test the capabilities of the tested equipment. As the operator's network construction is completed, operators will focus more on customer experience. Ixia will also provide system-level real service traffic testing to verify the network's related services and customer experience KPIs.

　　Judging from the layout of Chinese operators, the three major operators in China are actively preparing. For example, China Mobile has already started large-scale deployment and has clarified the deployment plan for VoLTE. Ixia has the strongest end-to-end testing capabilities in the industry and fully understands the relevant testing needs of domestic operators. We believe that LTE is a good development opportunity for us. Now, Ixia is ready and we will spend more energy on it.