TEKTRONIX COMMUNICATIONS EXPANDS GEOPROBE® FAMILY

PLANO, TX – 8 April 2015 – Tektronix Communications today announced the addition of two new solutions, GeoSoft ™ and GeoBlade ™, to its GeoProbe^® family, delivering a world-class platform, offering the ultimate in flexibility, scalability and optimized capital and operating expenditure for telecoms operators.

As a natural part of its evolution and in response to customer needs for increased capacity, greater deployment flexibility and enhanced visibility of total cost of ownership (TCO), Tektronix Communications has added to the GeoProbe platform with the launch of its new GeoSoft ™ and GeoBlade ™ probing solutions, sharing the same software architecture providing scalable and elastic and future proof capabilities.

GeoSoft is a revolutionary software-only or ‘virtual’ probe that has been developed in response to a number of carrier needs, including the move towards virtualized network environments. It supports both physical and virtual networks providing real-time and historic end-to-end session trace data, network-wide KPI visibility and enables the delivery of more innovative services, thereby improving customer experience as new services are launched.

With its ability to run on COTS hardware, GeoSoft represents a highly cost effective solution, with a number of benefits including analytics enablement. Traditionally, in parts of service provider’s networks characterized as “distributed low-bandwidth environments”, expensive methods such as traffic backhauling and aggregation methods were needed to get visibility of the data into the tool fabric.  GeoSoft provides a solution for carriers of all sizes to measure remote or rural geographies that may not have had a sufficiently strong business case to support the higher CAPEX requirements of traditional solutions.

GeoSoft’s VMF solution is elastic, scalable and completely NFV-compliant to work in harmony with other NFV solutions. It delivers a highly flexible answer for monitoring next generation networks as they scale and develop, enabling carriers to purchase precisely according to current and future requirements, rather than wasting unused capacity, or running ‘hot’ on limited capacity. GeoSoft is an essential component in measuring and understanding the quality of the new services that the service operators desire to launch in an agile manner using NFV enabled networks.

As operators launch and operationalize the new NFV networks, the existing, physical networks will still be in place for a long time to come. The need to get an overall view of the network (physical and virtual) is even more important. GeoSoft’s VMF solution works within the context of the best-in-class Iris Applications to enable the users to get a single view of the network.

GeoBlade™ combines elastic software and modular hardware, to cope with the demands of today’s massive data traffic growth, whilst providing the opportunity to scale at speed whenever needed. GeoBlade has the ability to support data transfer speeds from 10 Gbps to 100’s of Gbps, collecting and correlating massive amounts of data in real-time.

The GeoBlade platform enables the operators to optimize OPEX due to the ingrained capability of handling network topology, configuration and capacity management in a programmatic and automatic fashion, and improves data integrity with a built in innovative load balancing architecture. This capability to interact in real-time with service operators’ orchestration management layer also makes the GeoBlade platform a perfect choice to operate in a NFV environment where there is a need for a high density probing infrastructure.

With network traffic congestion at an all-time high and only set to increase, GeoBlade’s unrivalled capacity and scalability, enabled by its elastic software and modular hardware, make it the best value in monitoring technologies on the market today.

Commenting on today’s announcement, Said Saadeh, who leads the GeoProbe Product team at Tektronix Communications said:  “There is a common misconception in the probing market that a one size fits all approach exists.  Our experience and years of learning from our existing probing business, tells us that this is a fallacy as no two operators’ needs are ever the same, and the requirements of tomorrow will be substantially different from what they are today. That’s why the launch of GeoBlade and GeoSoft, represents a real evolution, and we are excited to be able to offer the most flexible probing platforms available in the market today.”

“This announcement demonstrates our understanding of the new market requirements of virtualized networks.  We understand that network infrastructure is changing and growing.  And we understand the need for tight CAPEX and OPEX control and visibility over total cost of ownership.  The newly enhanced GeoProbe family caters for the full spectrum of our Carrier customers’ needs, enabling them to achieve growth and scalability at the lowest possible cost.”