"Six years ago, we were just three restless telecom executives, wanting to start our own business and looking for emerging Internet opportunities," says Alan Robinson, CEO of Shenick Network Systems. "We soon saw that real converged networks of IPTV, VoIP and data all sharing one broadband connection was rapidly becoming a reality, and we responded with diversifEye, a system for assuring the quality and performance of these new services. So far, we've sold diversifEye to more than 50 top companies, including British Telecom, France Telecom, Qwest, Bellsouth, NTT, Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Lucent Technologies.

"It wasn't always easy," Robinson adds. "When we began, potential customers and investors were still recovering from the recent telecom crash, and we had to show them that we were part of their future. In essence, we did this by devising a way for our customers to detect IPTV problems before their customers did.

"At first, business was slow, which turned out to be very lucky for us. It enabled us to visit and spend a lot of time with some of our first customers, who were in Japan. Their generous feedback resulted in key improvements to diversifEye and, above all, taught us the endless importance of listening to your customers."

"Last year, Shenick received Frost & Sullivan's Product Line Strategy Leadership Award in the European communications test equipment markets, and that and receiving their Communications Test & Measurement Emerging Company of the Year Award in 2006 are immensely gratifying. But it shouldn't stop there. As we and our industry continue to develop, I hope that, in spirit, Shenick will always be a young, emerging company."

Sankara Jambulingam, Frost & Sullivan's research analyst, says, "This year's award is especially deserving, because Shenick was one of the first companies to anticipate and address the many new real-world deployment issues that the emergence of triple play brought to IP communications."

Shenick has recently enhanced diversifEye. It remains the industry's only truly integrated converged network test system, offering everything from the emulation of tens of thousands of customer broadband connections with DHCP, PPP, VLAN support through to the emulation of real triple play customer scenarios over these services involving IPTV, VoIP, video on demand (VoD) and data such as Web, e-mail and P2P. Moreover, diversifEye can emulate and test a system's response to distributed denial of service (DDoS), virus, worm and spam attacks.