The Prognosis IP Telephony Assessor product stems from software first developed by Integrated Research in 1998 to monitor fault-tolerant Tandem/HP NonStop servers that are still in widespread use in telecommunications and financial services companies. The Prognosis monitoring tool has since been ported to offer native support for heterogeneous infrastructures built around Windows, Unix and Linux servers, and extended to the monitoring of a variety of network data traffic.
Data networks have not been built to withstand common problems such as jitter, delays, packet loss and bandwidth fluctuations, the company maintains. As such, testing is required before, during and after VoIP deployment.
Integrated Research maintains there is a perceived need for a VoIP simulation system, citing research carried out by Gartner Group that concluded up to 85% of existing networks were not ready for VoIP. By simulating actual VoIP traffic and recording the effect on the network, Prognosis IP Telephony Assessor can help establish if a network upgrade would be necessary as part of VoIP adoption, the company said.
The mainstay of the vendor’s business is around its core Prognosis transaction monitor that competes against products from BMC Software Inc and Mercury Interactive Corp. It offers drill-down root-cause features that help administrators to isolate and correct problems as they occur, and a variety of statistics that provides for application response time analysis.
The Denver, Colorado-based company was founded in 1988 and is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Revenue for the half-year ended December 2003 declined slightly against the year-ago numbers, to AUD 14.2m ($9.8m).
