Test and Assurance incumbents Netscout, Keysight Technologies, Viavi, Spirent, and EXFO are adapting their business models The cloudification of the network is a disruptive force across the entire network supply chain and lifecycle. It promises to deliver enormous economies of scale, yet at the same time it will force many network engineers and operations staff to rethink how to test and assure the new services in the future communication infrastructure. The decline in the traditional market for hardware-based network probes is set to continue. But operators still have a strong need for network test and assurance – albeit against a new kind of infrastructure. A Transformed Market The largest segment of the service assurance market is being transformed today. The traditional network probe market has been and continues to be in decline. The market forces in play will disrupt both active and passive probe markets. These include: Specialty hardware-based appliances are being substituted for Intel based Xeon processor platforms driven by network virtualization and cloud technologies. Workloads are being componentized and distributed to provide more resiliency and flexibility. Network functions can be run as virtual machines or as micro services in containers. Software controlled network lowers both capital and operational […]