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What all the fanfare's about
Mountain View's Fanfare Group simplifies network device testing

by Angela Hey

How does a small company get customers to take its products seriously? By combining a strong Web presence with face-to-face communications.

The Fanfare Group (www.fanfaregroup.com) recently attracted major networking players to a panel discussion at the Computer History Museum, which is fast becoming a favorite Mountain View location for company events. The company is backed by Matrix Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

Road networks fail because of slow vehicles, oversized loads, accidents, poor interchange design, closed access ramps, road repairs, faulty traffic signals, too few lanes, toll gates and rush-hour congestion. Similarly, computer networks fail for a plethora of reasons. If you've ever experienced downtime on your DSL connection you can appreciate how difficult it is to decide whether it is your computer, your software, your router, your ISP's router, your ISP's server or a rotten telephone pole that is causing the outage.

The Fanfare Group's objective is to test network equipment functionality early in the design and development process. Tcl (Tool Command Language, www.tcl.tk) is an embeddable, extensible scripting language that engineers typically use to develop test plans. FanfareSVT, the Fanfare Group's main software product, is higher level than Tcl, enabling engineers to build automated testbeds and easily reconfigured test modules. FanfareSVT can also generate Tcl scripts.

An engineer can use FanfareSVT to test a router by quickly generating a myriad of operating scenarios. The router vendor benefits from faster time-to-market, more reliable products and lower tech support costs.

After a sumptuous breakfast, Kingston Duffie, Fanfare Group's CTO, started the Computer History Museum event by describing how software testing has evolved from manual testing to PERL scripts to Tcl — and now to Fanfare's technology. Today, Cisco's Desktop Switching Automation Team uses Fanfare's software to accelerate testing.

Tom Grennan from Vyatta, an open source router startup, explained how Fanfare's approach helps them manage testing of open source network devices. Virtualization platforms like VMWare enable many network interfaces and user commands to be simulated and tested on one computer.

Bruce Nash from Ixia, a network protocol testing company, explained how the proliferation of network applications will increase the need for higher level testing tools like those from Fanfare.

A former Gartner Group analyst, Theresa Lanowitz from Voke (www.vokeinc.com), gave the results of a customer survey. She found that testers are now on a par with development engineers in most companies; as hardware functionality and network complexity increase, test engineering becomes a career destination. According to Lanowitz, only 27 percent of those surveyed thought that being a test engineer was a stepping-stone to another job.

This event showed marketing savvy on Fanfare's part. Combining remarks from industry gorilla Cisco with open source vendor Vyatta, enterprise vendor Ixia, and industry luminary Theresa Lanowitz, the Fanfare Group was able to attract high-caliber potential customers. And by creating a "webinar" from event content, they leveraged the marketing budget to reach hundreds.

Since the Tower of Babel, the quest for reliable communications between diverse communities has presented business opportunities and cultural challenges. Software that builds a test network and verifies that a device is reliable and easy to use is still quite far from being truly automatic.

The Fanfare Group takes vendors one step closer to building flawless networks. It is a slow process, but even a little company can improve gridlock on the communications highway.

(Disclosure: Angela Hey's husband John Mashey is a trustee of the Computer History Museum.)

Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.