I got some more time to tour the exhibits at VON during the middle of the day on Thursday, i.e. shortly before the exhibit hall was due to close. One thing that struck me was the increased presence of the test industry. I noticed more than a dozen booths before I started paying attention. Along the way, I talked to a few of the companies and then made it a point to stop by the booths of Empirix and NetHawk, both customers of NMS Communications, i.e. places where I knew people.
Without revealing who said what, and reading between the lines of what I heard, there are several things going on. It appears major equipment providers are beginning to buy equipment for their internal IMS labs. They've got different groups building different IMS systems and it's time to figure out if any of it works together. It also appears there are a few real UMA deployments which are causing operators to buy test equipment. Finally, generic VoIP deplyments are increasing. All in all, the test guys seemed upbeat.
Here's Mohamed Khan in the NetHawk booth. Their pitch emphasized end-to-end call signaling while their signage focused on UMA and IMS.
And here's the Empirix booth - somewhat larger and plenty of orange shirts. The focus was VoIP & IMS.
Earlier I commented that traditional VoIP has gone mainstream and mobile VoIP is still in the future (although there were some interesting items on display), so naturally Jeff Pulver's attention has turned to what's hot right now, i.e. video over the net.
But where "mainstream" sounds boring to me, it's evidently good for the test industry.
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