Microsoft has selected testing company Ixia as its official testing house for ensuring that mobile devices meet quality expectations when running the software company’s Lync application.
Microsoft Lync is a unified communications platform, which is increasingly being used on mobile devices due to the bring-your-own-device trend in the workplace. Lync provides instant messaging as well as voice and video chat for collaboration purposes.
“Enterprise collaboration tools have become a critical part of today’s working culture, and with the rise of BYOD, a good experience on mobile devices is essential,” said Todd Haugen, group manager of Skype Wi-Fi at Microsoft. “Microsoft is driven to ensure our customers have the quality Lync experience they expect, and working with Ixia to qualify the Lync ecosystem – starting with Wi-Fi network devices and now with the associated mobile devices – accomplishes this goal.”
Ixia has been working with Microsoft and its partners for the past year on Lync performance testing for equipment such as Wi-Fi access points, using Ixia’s Wi-Fi device qualification testing, the test company said. Now that testing is extending to mobile devices as well.
According to Ixia, the test process involves a week’s worth of testing during which Ixia uses its VeriWave solution to emulate “a full range of scalable, media-rich application traffic and measuring performance, roaming capabilities, interoperability, and more.”
Ixia provides a qualification report that includes performance, security and reliability data to Microsoft and the technology partner; Microsoft then decides whether the device qualifies for use with the Lync platform.
“Mobile usage is growing exponentially with more and more users depending on mobile devices to connect to and use mission-critical tools such as Microsoft’s Lync collaboration suite,” said Joseph Zeto, director of product marketing for Ixia. “Quality of experience is no longer a ‘nice to have,’ as enterprises and individual users rely on mobile devices to work anywhere and anytime.”
