Quality

Psytechnics Experience Manager 5 Release

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:07:38 +0100

Psytechnics announced at VoiceCon 2010 their latest update to Experience Manager, Experience Manager 5 with Service Desk. This comprehensive release is probably the most substantial feature update since the initial release of Experience Manager in 2006. What's new this time? Plenty. They've implemented a strategy to deliver a much broader scope of operational performance than every before. They've partnered with leading endpoint vendors, UC communications companies including Microsoft and IBM t...

Keynote Systems Tracks The Internet Experience

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:32:25 +0100

The King of Pop died yesterday and not only is his genius and talent all over the music industry, but his passing was reflected by a momentary degrading of the Internet as fans and music afficianados around the world looked to major news sites for facts, songs and videos. The graph shows how performance was cut in half (4 seconds to 9 seconds) and average availability of leading news sites dropped some 15%. Major sites included in this News Site Index included ABC, AOL, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN,...

Psytechnics Earns Sametime Credibility

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:48:11 +0100

Pushing the yardstick forward on the great quality march, the brilliant folks at Psytechnics earned another endorsement from the largest realtime application vendor for large organizations - IBM Lotus Sametime. Sametime has more marketshare than Microsoft Office Communicator, and is particularly well entrenched in large organizations. To complement their existing, well-established Microsoft relationship and the IBM Global Services use of the Psytechnics implementation to proactively monitor and ...

uTest Blends Software QA and Social Networks

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:00:00 +0100

Software testing is not an easy process. It is the brute force review of functionality and is often considered a necessary, but unpleasant experience. In fact, most software developer regrets having to do QA and even worse, wait for QA by others to finish so they can start working on the bug fixes. And, every QA manager loathes the pressure of testing products where management has high expectations going into the test bed, especially when they're already late to market, because revenue will b...

Video Quality Measurement

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:12:48 +0100

I've been researching the video quality standards and have been learning about a little known agency of the US Department of Commerce - the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, in Boulder CO. The ITS has been active in development of video standards including several ANSI standards that also contribute to ITU recommendations. ITS was established in the 1940s as a radio propagation lab as part of the National Bureau of Standards in the US Dept of Commerce. The ITS, as the research an...

Management-as-a-Service

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:21:06 +0100

Communicado-Inc of Santa Ana CA has developed a really solid product-software-service combination that promises to really shake up the market for quality of service management by making it VAR-friendly, scalable into small organizations of as few as 50 users, and commercially attractive. Our research on the quality of VoIP service management shows a compelling need for defect-free communications and a solid differential between the Poor Performers and the Top Performer. The appliance ...

Is Improving Voice Quality a Priority For You?

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:00:00 +0100

It should be. Think about the phone calls that you’ve taken at your desk in the past few weeks. How often do you experience garbled speech? Background noise? Calls suddenly dropping? Audio delay? Participants can’t hear you or you can’t hear participants? 45% of participants in the Brockmann & Company report When Quality Counts said they experience at least one of these most common defects at least once in the past month; 22% experience it at least once a week...

Zeus Speaks Truth

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:47:54 +0100

I have been a fan and collaborator of Steve Taylor, owner-operator of Webtorials.com, the white paper repository for the communications industry, for many years. Vendors, standards fora and analysts post their reports and papers there for authenticated user consumption. A recent post, originally written in the September 2007 issue of BCR, by Zeus Kerravala, called "Management may be the most important VOIP application of all" (subscription required) really set the stage for much o...

Quality of Video Clip

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:44:15 +0100

Here's a simple but effective clip covering the 10 most serious quality defects in IP video transmissions. The 10 defects reviewed include: Lip Sync Audio Noise Audio Loss Video Blockiness - Type 1 Video Blockiness - Type 2 Video Jerkiness Video Freeze Video Blackout Video Blur video Noise ...

The Need for Quality

Thu, 22 May 2008 09:55:19 +0100

As communications industry undergoes significant changes in the architecture of networks and services, the role of Quality needs to be rethought too. The telecom industry is a bastion of quality technology. In fact, it was Bell Labs that employed Dr [[Walter A. Shewhart]], generally known as the father of statistical process control, who in 1924 wrote the 1-page memo that laid the groundwork for the application of statistics in manufacturing. Clearly, consumers have benefited from the ...

Psytechnics Comes to Beantown

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:48:12 +0100

On a sunny afternoon in the beginning of August 2007, Brockmann & Company took a meeting off Copley Square with Anthony Finbow, CEO and Dr Mike Hollier, CTO of Psytechnics, the voice and video quality company. As a preamble to the firm's participation in Fall VoiceCon August 20-23, a trip to the Boston area to see the New Hampshire office, meet customers and partake in an analyst meeting or two made the effort most productive. Our meeting centered on the history of the firm and...

Brix Measures Video over IP Quality

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:00:00 +0100

In researching my entry about Intelliverse and VoIP quality, I checked out the folks at Brix Networks. There I found a neat link to a delay and jitter measurement site. They have deployed agents in each of a half-dozen sites around the world (London, Boston, San Jose, Montreal to name a few) and measure the session performance between your location and their endpoint. The reports coming back from the site: testyouripvideo.com are web-automated and both simple and sophisticated, depending ...

Intelliverse Makes VoIP Quality in Hosted Services an Issue

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:45:05 +0100

This may be the right question for mobile users, but is the question, "Can you hear me now?" the right question for VoIP users, for business VoIP users? I spoke with Frank Paterno, VP Marketing for Intelliverse (not on the left), the Atlanta-based hosted VoIP provider, who briefed me on what the company is doing to assure VoIP quality in the 'bring your own broadband' segment. The company has two leading segments, the wholesale VoIP market where Intelliverse is inside...

Improving VoIP Audio Quality

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:00:00 +0100

Most small and medium business deployments of IP PBX functionality have kept all the voice in the LAN. That's because most of this class of user had simple wide area network needs and were the target of the early vendors into the IP PBX market. Some larger organizations and even carriers implemented VoIP traffic across the WAN, but learned the importance of always paying careful attention to the voice quality. Features like Quality of Service, Differentiated Services and even MPLS Class...

Psytechnics Gets a Microsoft Moment

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:00:00 +0100

At VoiceCon last week (I was there Tuesday March 6 - Thursday March 8) I had a chance to speak with Benjamin Ellis, the VP of Marketing for Psytechnics. The company is big on the VoIP users' experience. With extensive capabilities for measuring and managing the quality of VoIP quality, the company's 40 + employees ought to be very proud of having their benchmark test method referenced in a recent Microsoft press kit reference. In this report Psytechnics proves that the Microsoft Vist...