Openet and Procera will be at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) next week demonstrating a virtualized version of Revenue Express.
Revenue Express is a policy and charging control solution on which the two companies are collaborating. It combines Openet’s (News - Alert) Policy Manager and Procera’s Intelligent Policy Enforcement. And the virtualized solution being demonstrated at the event in Barcelona leverages network functions virtualization at the mobile core.
This is important because it could give service providers more granular network intelligence to make better business decisions.
As Ken Osowski, director of solutions marketing at Procera Networks (News 
- Alert), wrote in his column in the January/February issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, NFV provides a standards-based model for virtualizing an array of network element functions that exist in IT and service provider networks today, and both private and public network operators are embracing NFV as a way to simplify the management of their networks.
“Vendor products that operate in the network application domain such as application servers and policy platforms will be able to quickly adapt since these ‘network applications’ are running in the user memory address space of off-the-shelf Unix operating systems,” wrote Osowski. “These products can be readily virtualized without significant re-engineering.”
He goes on to say that if network intelligence can be gathered in any part of the network because it is virtualized, service providers can gather network intelligence that is specific to that part of the network, giving them a much higher resolution view of that traffic as it transits various parts of their access and core network infrastructure.
“All of this can be fed in real time to SDN components using data collector APIs,” he continued. “This closed loop model leads to better actions on the part of SDN components. From a qualitative analytics viewpoint, all of the network intelligence gathered in network-distributed, virtualized NEs gives service providers more granular network intelligence to make better business decisions.”
Edited by Cassandra Tucker
