Behind the scenes of any communications array lurks the potential for enormous operational disruption, with the interruption of vital connections an unwelcome (but all too common) occurrence. For those tasked with maintaining the quality of these connections, modern advances in computing and data analysis are providing them with just what they need to keep things running smoothly.

Tom Magg, CTO and VP of Business Development at Spirent Communications PLC, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss Spirent’s role in modern communications, the widening avenues of relevant data and a few of the ways in which Spirent is applying its findings.

From the start

Magg shared some of Spirent’s background, as well as a look at some of its recent adjustments to better fit the changing market. “Spirent has a long history, starting in the 1920s, with installing line equipment on poles for electric service,” he said. “Most recently, they’ve morphed into concentrating on test analytics across the board, but primarily on communications service providers.”

As part of that shift, Spirent is moving from pre-launch testing “to actually getting into the live network and being able to monitor that to ensure the continuation of the quality.”

Qualitative aggregation

In serving communications service providers, the users are a major part of the equation, particularly when functionality becomes compromised and prevents them from communicating in the ways that they want.

By drawing in objective data and combining it with HP Vertica (a Big Data SQL analytics platform) to baseline them against subjective information, such as customer surveys, called-in complaints and social media, Magg said that Spirent “can then formulate a relationship between key performance indicators and subjective measures” and thereby identify which of the factors in these situations are of greatest importance to the users.

Using R (a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics) to establish attribute importance in conjunction with the Vertica analysis, Spirent is narrowing down the areas of focus for its clients, both across the board and in application to individual situations.

Data everywhere

“If you’re a service provider, you probably have a lot of this data, but it’s scattered all over the place,” Magg noted. As Spirent performs data aggregation and inspection on a local basis with Vertica, rather than copying it off-site, it enables a quick turnaround of results.

Magg also touched on the consideration that clouds offer potential for such tasks as comparing data across multiple holdings, establishing regional differentiators and more, but he felt that these utilities had not yet reached a point of major usability or infrastructural embedding.

Finding real problems

Using R to determine whether mobile device returns are being done due to actual problems with the device, and reducing the cost from handling misidentified problems, is another way Spirent is working with its customers. And in this context, the need for speed becomes even more pronounced.

“One of the keys that Vertica enabled from a performance point of view was to be able to ingest that data, get it quickly in the database and reduce that latency [of reaction to customer issues],” Magg said, describing how his company had been able to streamline a process that once took about an hour into just a few minutes.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE