Test and monitoring company Empirix launched a multi-city road show in November called the Demystifying IMS Tour that provides pragmatic knowledge for deploying IMS. Next quarter the company begins the tour's European leg.

So far, Empirix has delivered case studies, workshops and informal lectures to seven of its largest customers in the U.S., including Sprint, SBC and Motorola. The program is what Duane Sword, vice president of product management at Empirix, calls the "trusted advisor approach."

"More often than not when we go into a customer environment, they aren't just asking what can our product do or for a quote, a price and a demo. They are asking for some degree of impartiality on how to solve their problems," Sword said.

The tour is targeting both service providers and network equipment manufacturers. Its mission, according to Sword, is to convey the knowledge Empirix has accumulated in the area of IMS to service providers and NEMS to help them plan their IMS roadmaps and implementations.

"It's not just the deep knowledge about the technical specs or functional attributes of IMS people are thirsting for. It's the more pragmatic, pre-planning domain knowledge they want," Sword said.

Empirix defines IMS as an emerging network architecture standard that allows wireless and wireline carriers to use a common IP application core based on SIP to deliver a host of multimedia and traditional services across any access technology. Sword said that IMS is more mature than people think but that practical IMS expertise is hard to find.

As one of the leading suppliers of voice-over-IP testing solutions, an early participant in testing for session initiation protocol (SIP) and operator of CT Labs, which it acquired in January of this year, Empirix feels it has that expertise.

The company is going to service provider and NEM locations to explain their take on the state of IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture adoption, provide deployment examples, help them understand what IMS means to them and offer proven testing strategies for IMS readiness.

"We aren't here to throw any vendor under the bus or to sing their praises. We're not pointing fingers at anyone saying they didn't interpret the spec right. Nor do we try to push services down their necks," Sword said. "We are impartial and that has resonated well. We are able to speak through some of the positive and negative scenarios we have seen, which leads people to ask questions about solving the problems."

Sword said that where Empirix does not address certain problems it has no qualms about referring people to other providers for a solution.

"As a way to build relationships, trust and credibility with customers, if you talk about problems and how to solve them as opposed to products and what they can do, people are a lot more attentive to that," Sword said. "The best thing you can hope to aspire to in test and measurement when you are in the trenches enabling other people to succeed, is to be a trusted advisor."

Empirix also has about 40 members of its team in Japan bringing its road show message to companies there.