Operators Turning to Policy Management for More than Bandwidth Control

By Anil Sharma, TMCnet Contributor

A new survey by Infonetics Research, an international market research and consulting firm, has found that operators are turning to policy management for much more than bandwidth control.

The survey, “Policy Server Deployment Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey,” is part of Infonetics Research’s (News - Alert) Continuous Research Service (CRS) series of analyst reports and surveys about the next gen OSS and policy market.

The survey provides insight into the investment drivers, vendor selection criteria, strategies, and integration efforts of operators deploying policy servers.

According to the survey, Tekelec (News - Alert) (who recently acquired Camiant), Openet, and Bridgewater Systems came out on top when operators were asked to list who they consider to be the "top three policy management vendors."

The top application driving operators to deploy policy management is mobile broadband, specifically, the ability to manage the network congestion caused by 3G services and applications.

The survey found that betwork departments (engineering and operations) are the primary decision-makers for policy management purchase decisions, but 20 percent of respondent operators say their IT department "owns" policy management in their organization

"We have long said that policy is moving beyond basic bandwidth management to enable differentiated services and value-added subscriber capabilities, and this survey confirms that belief,” said Shira Levine, directing analyst for next generation OSS and policy at Infonetics Research, in a statement.

“While traffic management remains a key driver behind policy management deployments, operators tell us that they are increasingly implementing policy solutions to better monetize their networks, including tiered services and subscriber control capabilities, such as parental control," said Levine.

For the survey, Infonetics Research interviewed purchase decision-makers at 25 telecom service providers, including several of the world's largest mobile operators and some high profile competitive players in emerging markets.

The operators surveyed represent 23 percent of the world's telecom capex ($66 billion) and 28 percent of worldwide telecom revenue, and hail from EMEA (particularly Western Europe), North America, Asia Pacific, and Central and Latin America.

(source: http://policy-management.tmcnet.com/topics/policy-management/articles/113280-operators-turning-policy-management-more-than-bandwidth-control.htm)