At Enterprise Connect 2025 in Orlando, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kurt Dahlstrand, Senior Director of Strategy and Solution Engineering at Hammer, a long-established player in the contact center testing and assurance space. Over the course of our conversation, it became clear that Hammer is undergoing a significant evolution—adapting its legacy of testing excellence to meet the demands of modern, AI-enhanced contact centers.
While Hammer is widely known for its stress testing capabilities—helping organizations validate contact center infrastructure before going live—its portfolio now extends well beyond simulated load. Today, the company is helping enterprises design, validate, and continuously optimize customer and agent experiences across increasingly complex, multichannel environments.
From Contact Center Load Testing to Lifecycle Assurance
At its core, Hammer helps enterprises ensure their contact center solutions work reliably at scale. Traditionally, this has involved generating high volumes of simulated calls or chat sessions to stress-test infrastructure before a major go-live event or seasonal peak. But as Dahlstrand explained, the scope of value Hammer delivers now covers the entire lifecycle of a contact center application.
“Before you go and simulate thousands of users, you have to ensure the applications and bots are designed correctly,” he said. “And after go-live, the question becomes: is it still working well, and are you realizing your return on investment?”
That full-lifecycle approach is increasingly relevant in a market defined by rapid change—particularly the accelerating adoption of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms and AI-powered self-service tools. With new features and channels being introduced continuously, enterprises need assurance that their systems will continue to perform under evolving conditions.
AI in the Contact Center—And in the Testing Process
One of the most prominent themes at Enterprise Connect 2025 was the explosion of AI technologies, especially in the contact center domain. For Hammer, this has manifested in both the systems they test and the tools they use to perform those tests.
On the testing side, AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents are a growing focus. “A lot of it really isn’t changing that much from our perspective,” Dahlstrand noted. “These bots are still trying to answer customer questions and provide service in a self-service fashion.”
However, Hammer is also beginning to incorporate AI into its own testing processes, using AI-driven exploration and automation to streamline how applications are tested and validated. This supports Hammer’s broader goal of making human testers and IT operators more effective and efficient.
The company is also adopting an “agentic framework”—a collaborative initiative across Hammer and other business units within Infovista, its parent company. The framework aims to enable more automated workflows and drive better cross-platform efficiencies. In time, this could lead to intelligent systems that not only identify network or application issues, but also resolve them autonomously.
Extending Visibility with Ativa
Hammer’s ambitions are also expanding beyond simulation and validation into real-time, end-to-end observability. A significant part of that strategy involves introducing the Ativa platform—a tool historically used by telecom service providers—into the enterprise market.
Ativa provides deep packet-level insight into all communications traffic flowing through a network. By correlating every leg of a call and every device it traverses, Ativa enables a full view of the call path—at scale.
“It’s like Wireshark on steroids,” said Dahlstrand. “You get full visibility into hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of calls a day, and you can pinpoint exactly where issues are occurring.”
This capability is especially valuable when integrated with Hammer’s simulation tools. The combination allows organizations not only to emulate users and identify stress points but also to observe real-world traffic, diagnose performance bottlenecks, and accelerate root cause analysis. And with the agentic framework in play, the system may soon be able to take corrective action without manual intervention.
Real-World Impact at Enterprise Scale
Hammer’s technology is already being applied in high-stakes enterprise environments. Dahlstrand shared the example of a global retail organization preparing for the busy holiday season. The retailer needed to validate the performance of its customer service channels—both voice and digital—under peak conditions.
Hammer simulated 20,000 concurrent phone calls alongside 15,000 live chatbot sessions, ensuring that the retailer’s infrastructure could handle the seasonal spike in customer interactions. This type of large-scale validation is increasingly vital, as even short outages during peak periods can lead to lost revenue and damaged brand trust.
“Especially in retail, uptime during the holidays can be the difference between a strong quarter or a major loss,” Dahlstrand noted. “We’re helping them ensure their systems are ready to perform when it matters most.”
Continuous Testing in a Dynamic Landscape
A key takeaway from the conversation was the growing awareness among enterprises that communications networks are not static. With new applications, services, and user expectations emerging constantly, there is a need for continuous validation and optimization.
This dynamic reality underscores Hammer’s evolving role—not just as a testing company, but as a partner in ensuring performance, reliability, and customer experience across the full spectrum of contact center operations.
Our ANGLE
As enterprises modernize their contact centers, adopt AI, and move toward cloud-based platforms, the need for comprehensive performance assurance becomes more critical. Hammer is positioning itself to meet that demand—not just with traditional stress testing, but with AI-powered tools, real-time observability, and autonomous remediation capabilities.
In a market that increasingly values experience over transactions, tools like the Hammer is essential—not only for launching new systems, but for sustaining high performance and trust across the customer lifecycle.
