As the world transitions to an all-IP paradigm, companies are deploying SIP trunks, unified communications and a host of related technologies. As part of its overall corporate strategy to address the needs of companies in this all-IP world, Acme Packet (News - Alert) acquired the Palladion network management and operations software suite. Now, the newest version of Palladion, version 3.0, boasts many new features, including fraud detection and prevention.

According to Alex Hoffman (News - Alert), VP of product management at Acme Packet, the Palladion software suite is developed with IP and packet-based networks in mind. It uses the latest technology and is flexible and 100 percent applicable for all IP, next generation networks. Hoffman stated that customers appreciate its usability. They do not need to be experts to use the product, as the complexity is hidden while still allowing users to drill down if they wish.

One key new feature included in release 3.0 of Palladion is new fraud detection and prevention capabilities, which were requested often by users. Users are concerned that hackers will break into accounts or steal money, and so developers created features to address this. Palladion looks at where calls come from and where they are headed to, learning patterns and detecting deviations from the norm. These deviations are given scores for different attributes (destination, number of concurrent calls, etc) and users can set thresholds and alerts. This is not a passive solution, and is integrated into a session border controller to help find suspicious behavior and stop loss.

With the prevalence of LTE (News - Alert) increasing, the folks at Acme decided to include diameter transaction features on the latest release of Palladion as well. Users can get insight into data excess, roaming, location updates and more. Hoffman pointed out that this requires monitoring on the transport – rather than application – layer, and Palladion offers the same usability and ease of use for this feature as with others. Users can drill down to get detailed information and can set up alerts.

These new features are in addition to the existing features of precious releases of Palladion, including its ability to monitor operations, including VoIP, conferencing and more in an all-IP network.  Another feature of Palladion 3.0 is its mediation engine, which users can install on a network, giving them a global view of a large network. This feature connects to different deployments, uses little bandwidth, and shows end-to-end information for these large networks.

Hoffman gave an example of one customer, Telesphere (News - Alert), which performed a test. It asked to different people to look at the same problem independently. One did it the old way, and it took 40 minutes. One use Palladion, and it took five. While the 80 percent difference may not be typical, it is clear that the solution can be quite the time saver for companies, which should give it immediate ROI.