TM Forum: Broadhop delivers policy builder, smartphone hooks

Policy vendor Broadhop this week delivered new tools to help service providers more easily create network and service policies, with an eye on not just managing network congestion – a policy stronghold – but building revenue-producing new services.

Broadhop may not be the best known policy vendor – the company’s senior director of marketing, Dan Geiger, calls his firm “perhaps the least-known, least-marketing policy vendor around.” Nonetheless, the company’s Quantum Network Suite, released earlier this year, is its fifth generation policy, or PCRF, platform, and the vendor touts more than 60 customer deployments in almost 30 countries.

The policy market has been gaining major attention in the past year, as pure-play vendors like Camiant (recently acquired by Tekelec), Openet and Bridgewater; network equipment-makers like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks; and back-office vendors like Telcordia have all vied to capture high-profile contracts, particularly among wireless operators. While lightweight policy and rules-engines have found their way onto deep packet inspection (DPI) boxes and even network routers, as policy needs have become more complex, the need for high-powered, stand-alone policy servers has not diminished but increased, Geiger contended.

“We think policy in and of itself is still an art and deserves its own platform,” Geiger said, noting that with its latest release earlier this year, Broadhop has virtualized and modularized its policy platform to handle use cases “much different than what we’ve seen before – able to handle millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions of sessions.”

Indeed, with mobile data usage exploding, the easy win in the DPI/policy server market has been to enable congestion and usage management. While Broadhop supports such solutions, “we’ve always had a focus on driving new revenue-making opportunities for service providers,” Geiger said. “We’ve always been more application-centric.”

That focus is on display this week, with two new applications running on its new Quantum platform, announced today at the TM Forum Management World show.

The first, a new Policy Builder application, provides an integrated development environment tool to make it easier for service providers to build their own custom policy rules. The tool further decouples the policy server from the underlying network and OSS/BSS stacks, speeding the development of new policy-driven applications, Geiger said. The tool features a “workbench” style approach to building new rules, starting with templates and blueprints that operators can build on without detailed knowledge of underlying systems or complicated programming or scripting languages, he said.

Broadhop’s second new application delivers a new smartphone application framework – initially focused on the iPhone and Android – that places a piece of client software on mobile devices to enable mobile operators, and even in some cases users themselves, to select their service level via real-time interaction with a network policy server. For example, an operator could simply notify users if they are reaching a usage tier limit, or they could implement things like loyalty programs to reward their best users with extra peak bandwidth. Broadhop’s new software handles the client-side piece of such user-to-network interactions.

Both applications are focused on setting up the policy server as a key application-enablement platform, Geiger said.

“Service providers have been coming to us and saying ‘Internet and mobile app developers are kicking our butts, we can’t keep up with them,’” Geiger said. “Policy is one way to keep things innovative. Operators can create policies and use their underlying network intelligence to create new services as rapidly as an Internet or mobile app developer can.”