ip-label newtest development focal points
	By Alain Gouret, Director Product Development

In corporate networks where developments in IT management conform to an ITIL rationale and a strong need for integration at the core of IS, we plan to enhance the Newtest solution with a view to offering greater ability to manage these demands.

First, there is a need to interface with corporate repositories upstream from the supervision service. Such repositories represent as many features of configuration management, SLA management and management of the supervision of Newtest components. They will operate using API web services which will offer our customers great flexibility for interfacing with our system. It is planned to be implemented in accordance with our customers’ mature ITIL culture and their principles of CMDB management. Reflecting this approach, administration of user profiles in the supervision module via the company’s address book and management of rights will also be a feature available in forthcoming versions of NMC and Newtest Reporting.

At the same time, delegation of telephony management to IT departments means that the solution must be able to handle diverse test campaigns on VoIP and traditional architectures. These functionalities are currently being implemented in the context of the NMC solution.  

In addition, to facilitate the use of indicators by businesses lines beyond operations, we plan to expand the services offer around the use of pre-configured reports by integrating rules for advanced calculation of SLAs. These functionalities will be associated with a powerful library for graphical reporting to allow presentations to be tailored to various kinds of businesses.

Concerning the Datametrie product line, the main thrust of product development is aimed at assisting our customers in using emerging web technologies. Rich internet applications call for closer control over test plans as well as more elaborate tools for diagnostics. We continue to expand our services to take these developments into account, with a view to facilitating scenario scripting and analyses in line with expectations concerning application debugging.

In the interest of enhancing synergies with the IS of the companies using our services, we are in the process of developing XML bi-directional connectors allowing easy integration of ip-label data into our customers’ datawarehouses in order to make correlation with internal data possible. The same logic underlying the development of these connectors also aims to enable ip-label to capture indicators internal to the company – but initially outside its scope of activity – in the interest of feeding such data back into a common dashboard. This is the purpose of our Executive Report offer.

As for methods and tools, we are developing a “stealth agent” approach which so as to gain a wider base for gathering performance metrics. This technology is currently being integrated, and will address needs for continuous monitoring as well as those for targeted analyses like technical audits.