Monetization of policy platforms will be a new trend

A shift in focus for policy strategy and platform investment is apparently taking place, as 100 senior engineering executives in telecom indicated they consider monetizing policy more important now than just defending their networks. In survey results released by Broadhop today, it became evident that the prospect of making money off of policy was starting to overshadow the focus on using policy to keep costs down. About 52% of respondents indicated they’d consider the coupling of charging and billing with policy as “critical” to this need for monetizing services (generating revenue using policy).

Key to that monetization will be personalization, as 61% of respondents said applying policies at the level of the individual subscriber was the greatest priority going forward. To support that belief, 47% said they’d seek next-gen platforms that were flexible enough to accommodate use cases not even defined yet. “Before, you’d have a policy server at the edge sitting next to the network element with one specific purpose, but now, it can no longer be static; now, you need a more distributed architecture of policy servers working broadly across an entire network to accommodate personalized services,” said Dan Geiger, vice president of marketing, BroadHop.

That type of distribution of policy would help service providers personalize user experiences across geographies, devices and networks and as they move toward application-specific services, like free Facebook or Youtube or on-demand bandwidth boosts, or parental controls. It will help efforts to adhere to SLAs around services sensitive to preferences, locations and times of day for services.

Personalization of this degree will demand more processing power and scalability, which survey respondents cited as very critical to future decisions about policy platforms. If CSPs want to guarantee the same user experience whether a person is in New York or Los Angeles, or whether a parent is trying to control access over one type of device over another, you platforms capable of enormous amounts of intelligence and analytics processing will be needed. “About 47% indicated that next gen policy management platforms need to be flexible and scalable enough to deploy not only a fixed set of target use cases but also those not yet defined,” said Geiger.

Other findings in the survey showed that 22% of respondents thought the ability to apply policies in different types of networks was very important, and 15% named the capability for policies to be deployed by non-network specialists (e.g. product marketing) as another key requirement to look for.