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Six cheers for EXFO service assurance!


Innovation and collaboration in service of our customers

Innovation and leadership have always been front and center at EXFO, and amid today’s landscape of dramatic network transformations and unprecedented demand for outstanding services, it’s more important than ever to deliver solutions that will ensure superior customer experience in smarter, modern networks. The race to 5G and network virtualization have been top of mind this year for EXFO’s service assurance division, and the team has been dedicated to bringing to market leading-edge technology co-developed with communications service providers to enhance the customer experience. Being recognized as such is a great honor:

“Through sustained in-house innovation and smart technology acquisitions, EXFO has built a strong portfolio of assurance assets spanning passive and active probes, real-time topology and analytics,” said Anil Rao, Lead Analyst for Automated Assurance and Service Design and Orchestration research programs at Analysys Mason. “EXFO’s new-look assurance portfolio positions them favorably among CSPs that are embarking on a journey to automate operations and deploying NFV and 5G at scale.”

With six prestigious awards this year for service assurance alone, we wanted to take the time to highlight how much it means to us, congratulate our team of dedicated experts and thank our customers who make all this possible. Bravo!


TM Forum: Outstanding Catalyst Innovation

EXFO proudly brought home the TM Forum Outstanding Catalyst Innovation award for Blade Runner, a proof-of-concept delivering augmented reality over 5G. The Catalyst Team Awards recognize communications and digital service leaders who demonstrate outstanding work and commitment to the future through their involvement in the Catalyst program. Blade Runner was a futuristic POC— jointly run by AT&T, BT, du Telecom, NTT, Orange, Verizon, Telecom Italia Mobile, Vodafone Group, BearingPoint, CENX, Infosys, RIFT.io, and other industry leaders—that enabled the orchestration and assurance of a composite set of cloud services across a diverse partner ecosystem using the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture. EXFO covered service assurance by providing virtual probes, enabling closed-loop automation and seamless service continuity and demonstrating the ability to scale services to maintain network quality.

MEF: Proof of Concept Award

It rained honors on the Blade Runner this year! EXFO won a second award for its contribution to this collaborative project demonstrating orchestrated, multidomain, augmented reality. The Proof of Concept Awards recognize technology demonstrations that best showcase how agile, assured, and orchestrated services can be delivered across automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks in accordance with the MEF 3.0 framework. Learn more.

Network Virtualization Europe: Best Service Assurance Solution

Next, EXFO’s NOVA received NVE’s Best Service Assurance Solution Award, which recognizes solutions that offer quality of service going above and beyond. With NOVA, EXFO was instrumental in deploying Europe’s first full telco cloud network by providing a fully virtualized NFV service assurance solution for Three UK’s leading-edge network. The solution is business critical, not only for monitoring NFV and managing QoE but also for driving network performance while ensuring customer satisfaction and new revenue streams. To find out more about EXFO and Three UK’s partnership, watch the video.

MEF: Technology Solutions Award for Service Assurance

Last but not least, our new service assurance ally, EVA, EXFO’s verifier agent, was best in show at the 2018 MEF Awards—a world leading awards program in the area of emerging dynamic network services powered by lifecycle service orchestration (LSO), SDN, NFV, SD-WAN, and Carrier Ethernet technologies. EXFO’s EVA is a software agent for non-hypervisor host devices—a powerful network service assurance solution that, once deployed, provides advanced L2 to L7 performance testing and end-to-end visibility.

Frost & Sullivan: Frost & Sullivan 2018 Customer Value Leadership Award

This latest award from Frost & Sullivan is the company's fifth in the last seven months. It recognizes the value EXFO brings in Global Data Analytics for Communications Service Providers. It highlights EXFO’s ability to optimize subscriber experience and maximize benefits for service provider teams, from engineering to customer care. Frost & Sullivan also acknowledge our unique position in solutions based on automation, data science and co-development with customers.

TM Forum Catalyst Team Award: Outstanding Contribution to TM Forum Assets

Each year, TM Forum recognizes Catalyst teams who have demonstrated outstanding work. The winning projects are made up of collaborative teams of communications and digital services leaders who demonstrate commitment to the future of the industry through work in the Forum’s Catalyst program. EXFO is thrilled to have been on the team that won the Catalyst Team Award for Outstanding Contribution to TM Forum Assets, celebrating its participation in NaaS in Action, with other industry leaders such as Telstra, Sri Lanka Telecom, Infosys, Sigma and Ciena. The project demonstrated how the NaaS (network as a service) abstraction layer automates the rapid definition, orchestration, testing and ongoing closed-loop monitoring of a complex composite service across different technology domains.

We’d like to thank . . .

Once again, we’d like to share our deep appreciation for our team members for their dedication, expertise and hard work. We also want to extend our sincere gratitude to all our customers who continually inspire us to break new grounds. “These awards are the fruition of co-innovation with our customers and reflect our dedication to work side by side with them to create superior solutions that keep the pace with network and technology evolutions,” says Abdelkrim Benamar, EXFO’s Vice President of Service Assurance, Systems and Services. “We look forward to another year filled with innovation, transformation and of course—celebration!”