Ixia’s network assessment and monitoring platform – Hawkeye – has been certified by Microsoft as an IT Pro Tools Solution for Skype for Business.

Ixia’s Hawkeye enables network readiness assessments for Microsoft Skype for Business by actively injecting traffic and measuring the performance and associated user experience over the network.

With Hawkeye, enterprise customers and their service providers can proactively monitor, manage, and measure the health and performance of their entire Microsoft Skype for Business pre-launch assessment to deliver:

- superior quality on day one, and less fire-fighting in production, through identification of network issues before roll out;

- greater visibility and improved planning for final roll out by early detection of potential hidden costs for required network upgrades;

- a quality rollout with rapid end user adoption by leveraging the UC investment to enhance overall productivity.

Ixia’s Hawkeye proactively generates and analyzes synthetic network and application traffic to assess how applications and services will perform from an end-to-end perspective. Certification under Microsoft’s IT Pro Tools Program for Skype for Business is expected to further bolster confidence among partners and enterprise clients.

“By participating in the Skype for Business Certification Program, Ixia’s Hawkeye has been tested and proven to be an enterprise grade communications solution for Skype for Business,” says Paul Cannon, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft. “Ixia is now a member of our diverse ecosystem of best of breed vendors for unified communications pre-assessment and rollout.”

Hawkeye’s coverage spans wide area networks (WAN), local area networks (LAN), virtual private networks (VPN), and cloud access to wireless LAN (WLAN) architectures. As a result, Hawkeye can help validate that complex business-critical services will be available 24x7.

Hawkeye simulates application traffic and sends key performance metrics to a central console, enabling IT professionals to easily detect, diagnose, and fix network performance issues before they impact end users.

Hawkeye enables customers to:

- Rapidly deploy new services with pre-launch assessments for business applications (e.g. VoIP, UC, video conferencing, business critical applications) over wireline and wireless, including cloud migration projects.

- Automate day-to-day IT tasks needed for managing complex network and application environments across offices, campus networks, and virtual data centers.

- Control network and services performance with cost-effective software endpoints or turnkey probe distribution that delivers expansive coverage.

- Proactively detect problems and implement tests with clear demarcation points to locate network and application issues for quality of experience (QoE) against expected service levels.