VIAVI Acquires Expandium to Complete Virtualized Assurance Portfolio

Viavi Solutions today announced that it has acquired Expandium, a provider of core network monitoring and assurance solutions powered by big data, based in Saint-Herblain, France. This acquisition augments VIAVI’s leading network assurance portfolio with a cloud-native virtualized solution offering, in alignment with virtualization initiatives at Tier-1 service providers worldwide.

In order to manage operations and customer experience across generations of technology, between wireless and wireline networks, and into new domains such as IoT and V2X, carriers are moving away from proprietary hardware to software-defined services running on off-the-shelf servers. The network itself becomes disaggregated, no longer a topology of discrete nodes, but a more dynamic and shapeable environment which can adapt to rapidly changing demand. The entire ecosystem supporting the network must evolve accordingly, replacing hardware-based solutions with containerized virtual machines which can respond dynamically as the network shifts.

As VIAVI continues to virtualize its NITRO Mobile portfolio of core and RAN assurance solutions, the company’s acquisition of Expandium adds cloud-native, microservices-based, and 5G-ready mobile core assurance technologies. Expandium uses advanced techniques such as machine learning, stream processing and pattern detection within a platform that is vendor-independent and can connect to heterogeneous data sources, offering analytics and insights for network monitoring, troubleshooting, fraud detection, and more.

“Our major service provider customers are reporting that up to 75 percent of their networks have already been virtualized, and they are expecting their vendors to deliver products that will fit into the new fully virtualized 5G SA architecture,” said Sameh Yamany, Chief Technology Officer, VIAVI. “Through our close collaboration with these customers, we have evolved our assurance technologies to seamlessly bridge the physical, virtual and disaggregated core and RAN. The combination of VIAVI and Expandium will enable us to deliver innovative 5G solutions that offer seamless, virtualized visibility for real intelligence and insight to support even the most aggressive virtualization initiatives.”

In addition to its solutions for mobile network operators, Expandium is also a leader in monitoring platforms for railway mobile services, including GSM-R and migration to LTE-R and FRMCS. VIAVI will continue to support Expandium’s position in this market.