Motive turns attention to business policy management

Service management software company, Motive, began offering a business policy management solution for DSL and broadband cable providers today, which demonstrates its efforts to develop solutions using the added resources of BroadJump, the Austin, TX-neighbor it acquired in January.

Motive introduced the Usage Policy Manager as part of a planned suite of products currently under development. The new policy management solution helps providers manage the profitability of their networks by automating the process for taking action on the network based on policies pertaining to their customers’ bandwidth usage.

Usage Policy Manager collects data from various network sources including e-mail servers, provisioning systems, operations support systems, security and CRM applications and then identifies usage patterns that providers can use to prevent churn or identify excess bandwidth utilization.

“The intent is to manage profit, not packets,” Kenny Van Zant, executive vice president of Motive’s communications business unit. “Before, there was no good way to connect customer usage and value.”

The solution makes this connection by using a business rules processor, a policy workflow engine and a business operations viewer. The rules processor manages policy creation and detects policy variances. The workflow engine enforces the rules and policies, including communicating those rules to the subscriber. The viewer is used by operations and customer care centers for access to account status and trends.

Motive has integrated its Usage Policy Manager with Juniper Networks, the first of many core hardware vendors with which the software supplier hopes to pre-integrate.

Motive expects its solution also will help broadband service providers address their small- to-medium business market. To that end, the company released a new offering called Business Class Manager earlier this month designed to help service providers model, automate and manage all the connections and interdependencies between their network and the systems and devices in their SMB customers’ networks.

“Providers [sometimes] re-label residential products at higher speeds, but to call that business class doesn’t fly,” Van Zant said. “Being able to control service levels will add the value of business class.”