In the next year, InfoVista (Euronext IFV - FR0004031649) – the leader in delivering proven solutions for proactive service assurance, expects to see telecom and cable service providers continue to roll out advanced offerings for business and residential customers, as well as increasingly sophisticated enterprise virtualization strategies that drastically reduce management and IT costs. Today, InfoVista weighed in on top market and technology trends ahead in 2008 and issued its own forecasts predicting how service providers and enterprises will drive their businesses forward in the new year.

Through customer feedback and overall market analysis, InfoVista has identified the following predictions for service providers in the telecom and Cable/MSO markets:

• Service Providers will continue to boost both high-end, media-rich residential services and advanced business offerings such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and business multi-media by deploying advanced Carrier Ethernet equipment in 2008. This, in turn, will reinforce the need for strong capacity planning and roll–out management capabilities.
• Service Providers will also seek to deliver higher value to business services offerings by providing application-centric network monitoring in order to give customers unsurpassed visibility into how individual applications are performing.
• Global emerging markets such as Asia, Africa and Latin America, which have recently created sophisticated mobile and broadband infrastructures, will provide significant, new opportunities for service providers to sell high-end services to local and regional businesses.
• The Cable/MSO service providers will aggressively court the small to midsized business (SMB) market with advanced video, Carrier Ethernet and hosted application services.
• The addition of wireless to the cable, Internet and phone services currently offered, will give Quadruple play cable operators even more power to compete against traditional telecom carriers for residential customers in 2008.
• Cable customers’ increasing demands for high service quality, quick-to-market delivery of new services and stringent SLAs will require that Cable companies optimize the performance of networked services, applications and infrastructure through increased investment in proactive service assurance solutions.

For enterprises, InfoVista foresees the following trends for 2008:

• As companies look to expand the use of virtualization to more mission-critical applications and services, attention will shift to the challenge of how to manage the increased complexity that virtualization introduces.
• Companies will also start to focus on real-time tools that can help them proactively address the ever-changing capacity requirements. As interest in overall service management grows in the Enterprise, many will turn their attention toward ways to integrate virtual machine monitoring into the larger server and network management architecture, and start to see the need for a unified management framework.
• 2008 will be the year that application performance takes center stage in enterprise IT as organizations fully embrace application performance and assurance strategies. As more IP based business-critical applications are deployed, enterprises will see a real need for application-centric network visibility, which will enable IT to identify and solve problems faster before business is negatively impacted.
• Application monitoring capabilities will continue to be important for enterprises and service providers in 2008, particularly those looking to improve internal operations and expand their catalogue into managed services.

“As service providers and enterprises continue to transform their IT processes in 2008 to take full advantage of the opportunities IP convergence presents, they will need service assurance systems that can provide visibility into end-to-end service performance,” said Alain Tingaud, Chairman and CEO, InfoVista. “Our mission is to empower customers to maximize business return and productivity by assuring the optimal delivery of networked services, applications and infrastructure. We have a long and successful history providing enterprises and service providers the solutions they need to lead their industries, and we’ll continue to respond to these market trends with advanced technology to meet changing needs.”