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Technology Evolution
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A Q&A with Jason Langley, senior implementation engineer for Hammer XMS
Catalyst: What is your specific role at Empirix? What experiences do you bring
to this role?
Jason Langley: As a senior implementation engineer, I manage projects and deliver implementation services for Hammer XMS deployments. Implementation engineers serve as a customer’s technical advocate and their central Empirix contact during deployment, and we also work to keep the project on track.
Prior to joining Empirix, I worked for more than a decade at a service provider, where my role included the implementation and support of test and monitoring systems. I have also been involved in the implementation and support of test systems in the lab and monitoring systems in the service provider space.
Thanks to this background, I can offer a “dual perspective,” considering an implementation project from both the customer and vendor points of view.
C.: Empirix “helps organizations adopt complex communications solutions with confidence.” How do the efforts of you and your colleagues align with this goal?
J.L.: Empirix has superior products, and my team provides a unique blend of project management and technical knowledge as part of the implementation services we provide. This combination of technology and expertise is enhanced by best practices and proven methodology—as well as by important lessons we have learned from past engagements—to ensure that the system is deployed in a consistent and supportable manner.
C.: How have you seen customer requirements and Empirix offerings evolve over time?
J.L.: Empirix has a highly collaborative relationship with our customers, and as customer requirements have evolved over time, our offerings have changed as well.
The primary evolution has been in the areas of protocol development and increased call processing capacity.
Beyond delivering new protocols, Empirix recognizes the importance of understanding how the customer uses the information and then enhancing our products based on customer feedback. One interesting example is the COPS protocol. Working with customers, we learned how to correlate and process the COPS messages, as well as how our customers were using Empirix technology to find provisioning errors that could impact the quality of service they provided to their customers.
To address increased call processing capacity, we developed the next-generation probe platform to meet the requirements for NEBS-certified platforms and to handle the call volumes generated by larger service providers.
Another critical change has been in our customers’ transition from regional or multiple-regional architectures to network-wide monitoring architectures that provide a national/global monitoring system for larger carriers, and the Hammer XMS will evolve in the future to offer a distributed architecture to support network-wide monitoring.
The way customers use Empirix technology has evolved as well. Initially, a system is used for diagnostics and troubleshooting in a “bottom up” approach that is focused on turning up service, responding to customer reports or reacting to network issues.
Over time, customers look to Empirix reporting capabilities and begin to use a “top down” approach to identify key network performance metrics. Analysis identifies how performance metrics are distributed and/or trending, and ultimately, users can drill back down the diagnostic level. Once the network performance metrics are understood, SNMP traps can alert the customer to degradation in network performance.
Customers have also expressed an interest in longer term storage of call, media, and performance data and have utilized the data export. Empirix is also very interested in how customer’s requirements will evolve overtime in this area.
C.: Empirix is clearly committed to delivering products that meet customer requirements. Do you have a personal philosophy that you apply to your work?
J.L.: Each customer’s architecture is unique, and this means that each system must be tailored to meet the specific business and technical goals of the customer.
My personal philosophy is first to understand the customer’s requirements so that the Empirix solution is deployed and used to its fullest. Then, we work to maintain momentum with system deployment after the services have been completed.
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