Actix, a supplier of Network Status Management (NSM) systems, has today announced the development of Actix Viewpoint, a web-based solution for the management and distribution of network performance engineering and status information. Actix Viewpoint is designed to deliver operational efficiency and consistency in the management, analysis and reporting of network performance engineering data across the wireless enterprise.
The addition of a new Call Trace Management module represents the most significant enhancement to the Actix Viewpoint platform to date, enabling mobile network operators to capture live call trace data to measure the performance of the mobile network on a per user basis. Using data directly from switches in the live radio access network, Actix Viewpoint 1.4 can give both engineers and managers access to information about all live calls running through a particular switch at any given moment, giving extraordinary granularity and accuracy in assessing network status.
Viewpoint's new Call Trace Management module not only delivers higher statistical relevance to any data captured, because of the number of calls being monitored, it also means the operator can gather massive volumes of data at a much lower cost due to the enormous data handling capabilities of the underlying Actix One enterprise-grade platform. Cost reductions of as much as 80 percent have been measured in live deployments of Viewpoint around the globe.
"Operating a wireless network in a mature market is becoming an increasingly complex engineering and management challenge, with service providers trying to enhance performance, improve quality of service and drive efficiency all at the same time", commented Chris Larmour, Actix' Chief Marketing Officer. "The primary focus of this latest Viewpoint release has been to help operators deal with this challenge by making mobile network performance and status management much easier and much less expensive. By working closely with Actix' Tier 1 customers in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, we have identified multi-million dollar inefficiencies, and made game-changing adjustments to Viewpoint to address these issues."
In all more than 150 enhancements have been made to Actix Viewpoint 1.4, including the addition of new reporting functionality to enable operators to view performance and experience indicators from competitive networks. A new Microsoft Excel reporting framework has also been added so that reports can easily be created using Viewpoint generated data at the push of a button, saving literally months of manual effort – typically such reports are generated manually today, taking man-months of effort to complete.
Processing speed has also been enhanced by making improvements to data handling and validation capabilities, which automatically identify problem files, missing information and erroneous figures to ensure data sources do not delay workflows and reports.
Further improvements have been made to the prioritisation of file processing and pipelines, as well as several map updates, which enable users to easily zoom into any area of the network and make location lookups using latitude and longitude or sector name.