By Bernard Breton, SVP Americas & APAC and Chief Marketing Officer, Infovista
This morning, Infovista's first annual User Conference since the acquisition of Mentum, kicked off at the Marriott Chateau Champlain in Montreal, bringing together more than 100 customers and partners from all around the world. To start things off at the beginning of the day, our CEO Philippe Ozanian shared some very exciting news — Infovista has finalized the acquisition of mobile network optimization provider Aexio!
We also heard from Analysys Mason Principal Analyst Mark Mortensen about network planning and optimization automation, and the five main challenges that operators are facing in the network planning process. Of particular interest, he described the evolution of network performance, planning and optimization from a series of loosely coupled activities to become a much more cohesive, holistic process. That's a major step in the direction of unified planning, service assurance and optimization for multi-technology networks, as networks get more complex with the addition of new technologies like small cells, machine-to-machine (M2M) and LTE.
We also heard from Bob Krentler, senior business development manager at Cisco, about collaborations between Infovista and Cisco on application visibility and control (AVC) to help communication service providers (CSPs) deliver a more application-aware network, and similarly, network-aware applications. Bob mentioned a recent deployment of 600,000 tablets in the Los Angeles school district — imagine the traffic implications of such a large-scale deployment! When operators begin to see this activity more and more often, it will also be important to consider how their networks are being used (are end users watching YouTube or tracking stock prices?) and how performance can be optimized to better serve that demand. With the acquisition of Aexio, combined with this collaboration with Cisco on AVC, Infovista brings subscriber-aware and actionable network intelligence to empower CSPs and mobile operators to better plan, operate, optimize and monetize their networks.
Be sure to follow @Infovista and use the hashtag #Infovista13 on Twitter to get more updates from the User Conference today and tomorrow. We'll also be publishing new pictures on our Facebook page, so be sure to check in there to see who is taking the stage here in Montreal!
