A coalition of service providers, network infrastructure and testing vendors joined forces to launch the Network Test Automation Forum (NTAF), an organization centered on promoting interoperability between test tools and simplifying lab automation efforts for both network equipment providers and their service provider customers.
Initial members of the NTAF include a representatives from the service provider community (BT and Verizon), traditional equipment (Cisco and Ericsson) and of course test/measurement (BreakingPoint Systems, Empirix, EXFO, Fanfare Software, Ixia, JDSU, and Spirent Communications) segments.
Traditionally, vendor and even service provider testing environments were done in a proprietary and standalone fashion, a process that would require months of testing before a product or service could be released into the market. NTAF aims to break that cycle with an open approach that encourages equipment vendors to work more closely with their respective service provider and network equipment provider (NEP) customers to create an open and advanced automation framework. By adopting multi-vendor technical architectures for test automation systems, test engineers and lab managers will be able to shorten the window of time to release new products and services.
For more:
- see the release here (pdf)