BOSTON--Monitoring and test company Empirix threw itself a party this week at VON, but the company had more to celebrate than its technology’s fifteenth birthday and its fifth anniversary as an independent company. Empirix also shipped its 4 millionth voice test port and was named again as market share leader in IMS voice testing and monitoring by Frost & Sullivan.

The Frost & Sullivan report, “IMS Network Test & Measurement Market for Voice Testing and Monitoring Applications,” is due out later this month. It focuses on voice, one of three major application segments within the IMS testing and monitoring market and the most critical for mass deployment of IMS, according to the report. The other segments are video and data.

“We have received 12 requests for proposal requiring attributes for IMS,” said Duane Sword, vice president of product management and marketing at Empirix. “Decisions are being made based on IMS.”

Frost & Sullivan identified Empirix as the market share leader for IMS voice testing and monitoring, with an estimated 25.7 percent share of the overall market for 2006, which the firm believes will be $155.5 million this year and $297.6 million by 2008. Empirix also leads the individual IMS voice testing segment.

Not resting on that market share, Empirix announced a new release of its Hammer XMS monitoring solution. Version 1.6 will offer capabilities for monitoring IMS as well as VoIP networks. Frost & Sullivan also named this as their VoIP product of the year in 2006.

“It may be a while before people start using these features, but this plays to our position as provider of lifecycle products,” Sword said. “It’s built-in protection for the future so customers know they won’t need a new box. We are not going to let product be an inhibitor for customers.”

Given IMS’ propensity for increasing the messaging and complexity of service deployment, this latest version of Hammer XMS features new protocol decodes and enhanced correlation, analysis and reporting capabilities for services in an IMS-enabled network. New Hammer XMS features for IMS monitoring include the ability to decode, analyze and correlate Diameter messages, the ability to decode Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) headers messages and the ability to decode, correlate and report based upon SIP Extensions for IMS.

Empirix also added enhancements for media quality including a new Media Reporting Probe, which specifically monitors media (voice) quality; a continuous Voice Quality Analysis application that provides a graphical representation of voice quality at every point in the call; and support for Dynamic Payload Codecs, G.726 and Internet and Low Bit Rate Codec. Empirix also tripled the number of simultaneous calls for RTP capture and playback.