59 2024 DIRECTORY | CHANNELVISION Touchstone Technologies takes network assessment, stress testing and analysis to the max. The company’s portfolio delivers testing and measurement services, at the time of its founding for the increasingly common video conferencing segment. With time, this evolved from the early days of switch circuit networks to standardization and beyond. Today, Touchstone represents 20plus years of experience in VoIP testing, measurement equipment and services. “We’ve made emulation capabilities our strength over the years,” said company president, Neil Urban. “Historically, we’re one of the few vendors that could offer that. We make a product line to talk to a device or – over the network – perform load or functional tests. The tools have broad functionality, including real-time voice and video call emulation, error injection and scripting for testing non-standard or custom call flows. Plus, our tools can verify functionality for callmanagement features – call transfer, call forwarding, on hold or navigating an auto attendant using DTMF.” Despite the increasing complexity of today’s networks, Touchstone has evolved alongside the latest methods of assessing performance. Widespread changes have provided opportunity for recurring tests and emulation, translating to a Touchstone tool that can check activity in real time. And while many customers remain entrenched in legacy assets, Touchstone also emphasizes SIP technology. “One gentleman who came up to our booth at CVxEXPO is building his own intelligent call flows with programmable voice capabilities,” said Urban. “He’s finding cases where there are interoperability problems, or something’s just not working as expected, and needed a way to test that. That’s where our emulation tools come in. Basically, you have a reference to test against to help you resolve any issues and validate system performance.” At its core, Touchstone’s technology helps bolster network confidence, whether deploying a development or assessment tool, to access analytics to bring products to market and networks up to speed. “You can design your own SIPenabled PBX system or voice applications, using any commercially available API, for your call center or enterprise network, with our help,” he continued. “You can do a robust functional and load test to uncover latent problems that, due to Murphy’s law, likely present themselves at the worst possible time. Maybe you run into situations where you want to have an excess of traffic load or something occurring due to a bandwidth limitation on the network under a ‘rainy day’ scenario that you want to replicate. It has to perform under more stress than usual. It’s essential that you test for the extreme cases if you want your network to perform under all conditions. When your network is running at maximum capacity, the last thing you want is for your communications to go down.” Touchstone also has products to do load testing with data, network profiling and tracing, traffic pattern simulations and other emulation scenarios, plus capabilities to do more with data protocols such as HTTP to understand web traffic. This allows it to more easily replicate and load test, using higher bandwidth to support scalability upward of 10G to 40G. “We can simulate and load test a network environment with a given traffic profile and saturate the network to line-rate with real world client/server connections, testing for application performance,” said Urban. “That’s something we couldn’t do before. It adds another dimension to the audio/video testing we support. You can automate network testing while it’s near its breaking point, testing other protocols and applications at the same time.” Heading into 2024, Touchstone Technologies sees a lot of value in the services that it provides. “The push is to streamline testing processes through automation and visualization of the results, with advanced reporting helping maintain networks and ensure operation at peak performance,” said Urban. “We’re continuing to advance protocol support for traffic generation and network emulation, so we can emulate streaming like we’re doing with Zoom and other platforms. “Look to the future,” continued Urban. “That’s where we are.” o For more information on Touchstone Technologies and its partnership opportunities, check out www.touchstone-inc. com or call (267) 222-8687. By Brady Hicks Touchstone Technologies: Forging New Capabilities in Testing Touchstone president Neil Urban
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