DAILY

According to Shira Levine, Market Analyst, Infonetics, “While the benefits of investing in
next-generation policy management are clear – including more efficient use of network
resources and the ability to create and deliver more innovative, personalized services – the
cost and complexity of implementing these solutions remains a deterrent to many
operators, particularly those in markets where capex spending remains constrained. A
hosted solution offers a faster and more efficient way to get new services to market while
also providing a more predictable cost structure. This is an appealing proposition to those
operators that lack the resources or the budget to embark on a more traditional deployment
of policy control and enforcement solutions.”
The evolution of policy management software allows for a scalable and repeatable clouddelivered
platform to reduce upfront investment and accelerate time to market for new data
offers. Let’s discuss some of the challenges facing operators, and how the hosted policy
platform can help to overcome them in a real world scenario.
Q1: WHY CHOOSE A BEST OF BREED HOSTED POLICY MANAGEMENT
SOLUTION?
John Landau: Currently, service providers have two primary models to implement policy
management within their network - either to work with “best-of-breed” vendors for specific
functional components requiring costly custom integration, or to purchase a more limited
pre-integrated “best-in-suite” end-to-end solution.
A best-of-breed approach delivers the most advanced and future-proof policy
management capabilities for key functions such as application identification, policy
configuration and information analysis and reporting. As the best-of-breed policy
management function is designed to sit outside of the network core, utilization is improved
on key network elements such as the GGSN or packet gateway, and common and consistent
policy control and enforcement can be applied to heterogeneous access networks, such as
3G, 4G, WiFi and fixed broadband for both home-network and roaming users. The
accumulated experience of our market-leading partners, Allot Communications and
Openet, allows our hosted approach to provide rich functions with a “light” integration into
existing infrastructure—less “fork lift” is required.
ADVERTORIAL
Simplify mobile data
monetization with Hosted
Policy Management
Q&A with:
John Landau,
Senior Vice President, Technology
and Services Evolution,
Tata Communications
Service innovation platforms are required to drive revenues, meet evolving
customer requirements and improve competitive differentiation. Policy
Management has emerged as the core enabler for operators to monetize the
huge demand for smart phones and data services.
PAGE 28
Vin Costello,
VP & General Manager,
Allot Communications Americas
Joe Hogan,
Founder & CTO, Openet
Q2: WHAT CHALLENGES ARE MOBILE
OPERATORS EXPERIENCING TO
DEPLOY POLICY MANAGEMENT
CAPABILITIES?
Joe Hogan: We are constantly looking to
improve how our systems are deployed and
managed. There are a lot of different
operators out there all with different
networks, so we work very hard to ensure that
the deployment of our systems is suitable
across a diverse range of networks. Deploying
complex network systems creates the
challenge of how to decrease the time and
cost of deployment and to ensure that the
management of these systems is not onerous.
Vin Costello: For smaller MNOs, total cost
of ownership has been a barrier to deploying
a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF)
in the network. They’ve simply done without.
Their challenge is finding an affordable way
to get into the policy management game so
they can elevate their service offering,
control network use and generate new revenues.
For large MNOs, scalability is the issue. The typical ROI model of making an up-front
investment in network equipment and getting a return over time is out of synch. The pace
of data growth is so fast that policy management equipment needs to be upgraded
frequently, requiring yet another round of up-front investment. Their challenge is to achieve
a positive ROI in as short a time as possible.
Q3: WHAT OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE TO REMOVE THE OBSTACLES OF
IMPLEMENTING THIS NEEDED CAPABILITY?
Joe: There has been a convergence of technologies and environments which makes new
policy deployment models feasible. Firstly, the advent of virtualization and cloud based
technology in general means that it is possible to design, build, and manage systems in a
more efficient manner than was previously possible. It also eases the challenges of scaling
for large systems. Secondly, we have seen the policy market mature in recent years, and
as the global leader in developing policy solutions, we feel that we are extremely well placed
to select the functionality best suited for our customers and deliver it to them.
Vin: Allot Communications has been working with partners to create what we call the
“Digital Lifestyle ecosystem,” where vendors and providers collaborate to develop the
functionality required for modern mobile networks. A pre-architected and pre-integrated
policy core consisting of PCRF, Subscriber Profile Repository (SPR), as well as Deep Packet
Inspection (DPI) and Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF) has huge benefits
because Policy and DPI have a synergistic relationship. DPI provides very rich traffic
intelligence which enables the PCRF to make more flexible policy decisions. As a result,
network operators have more flexibility and control when it comes to planning, scaling and
modifying their networks. And best of all, it can be implemented largely in the cloud.
John: The flexibility of our rich hosted platform allows our customers to provide very
different offers to their subscribers and compete strongly with each other. At the same time,
hosted policy management provides a common platform across multiple group operators for
a consistent approach and easily shared best practices for policy management. It also allows
for commercial flexibility through a “pay-as-you-grow” OpEx pricing model with support for
burstable numbers of subscribers. It allows operators to enhance both policy management
functions and scale as their networks grow and revenues increase.
All of this makes hosted policy management a great new approach - simpler deployments
with rich functionality. We bring the build on our experience and expertise from operating
leading global networks and managed services for service provider communities to ensure
success with the hosted model. this pioneering hosted solution.
Tuesday 26th February MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS DAILY 2013 | www.mobileworldcongress.com