EXFO has sold its Adaptive Service Assurance to a private equity company, which has relaunched it as NumoData.
A release from EXFO said that Teleo Capital has acquired people and assets related to its ASA business. Employees and leadership of EXFO’s ASA division are transitioning to NumoData. EXFO retains a minority stake in the new company, and CEO Philippe Morin will join NumoData’s board of directors.
Back in 2022, EXFO had big visions for its Adaptive Service Assurance business. A webinar with TMN involved Three UK and Orange, and talked about the need for AI-powered service assurance. Mark Hiseman, then of EXFO and present on the webinar, is now strategy chief with NumoData. Other leadership comes from ex-Nokia exec Mary O’Neill, CEO, and Mark Nixon, who lead EXFO’s ASA division from 2022 and heads up marketing at NumoData.
After talking a big game around AI-led assurance until 2021, the company went rather quiet in that area. EXFO itself became the target of an unwanted takeover from Viavi Solutions in mid-2021, before shortly after de-listing itself from a public listing. Although it remained active in equipment and fibre optic test, it retreated (at least publicly) from the wireless network infrastructure space. There was no EXFO exhibitor presence at the most recent MWC Barcelona, for instance.
Now it has resurfaced the business as NumoData, which positions itself as providing assurance for the “AI-native, autonomous network age.”
Mary O’Neill, Chief Executive Officer of NumoData, commented: “Today marks an exciting milestone for our company, our customers, and the telecommunications ecosystem. With our commitment to developing AI, and autonomous operations, we’re building customer solutions that will define the next era of network intelligence. Our mission is to empower operators – leveraging our trusted data to deliver smarter, faster, and more autonomous networks that enrich the digital lives of end users.
“EXFO’s adaptive service assurance solutions have helped network operators globally automate, analyze, and optimize their operations, and NumoData will now continue to innovate,” said Philippe Morin, CEO of EXFO. “This transaction allows EXFO to deepen its focus on test and measurement innovations powering the AI-driven expansion of fiber networks globally.”
The assurance space is a key part of the automated network feedback loop, with companies targeting the ability to verify and assure infrastructure, application and service performance within a cloud-native network, using AI techniques such as agents and LLMs where appropriate to understand and create digital topologies of the network and dependencies within it.
A press release on NumoData’s site lists one customer, Vodafone Germany, as a customer of such a solution, with the operator having licensed EXFO Context, a knowledge graph-based semantic modelling solution that provides end-to-end network and service visibility.
