BroadHop: Policy implementers seek new revenues, not new integration headaches

At the recent Informa Policy Control Conference in Amsterdam, Bill Diotte, CEO of policy vendor BroadHop found himself on a panel with BT and other global operators, all of whom felt they had basic network capacity issues fairly well under control. What was lacking, they agreed, was using the same policy platforms they’d used to manage network usage to drive new services and ultimately new revenues.

“Rather than scratching out a dollar with caps and tiers that disenchant subscribers, operators want to pursue new business models…some spoke of things like sponsored contributions where users pay only a small portion of an overall fee and content and ad sponsors would be the ones to subsidize services,” said Diotte.

In talking to CTOs and CMOs at the policy conference, Diotte noticed a common thread of anxiety about what implementing new policy platforms means to some operators. “It’s clear that people no longer want to grapple with integrating a collection of libraries in the hopes of creating innovative features and deploying new services,” said Diotte, who recommended that operators seek true “platforms” from which services are launched and modified without the need to make changes to core code. “You want a platform, which is a cohesive software module possessing certain features that can be accessed without having to change core code and without significant integration of libraries.” He added that solutions boasting “customization” for operators are sometimes euphemistically referring to intense integration. “When looking at development requirements with a vendor, you definitely want to determine if it’s a collection of libraries or a real platform.”

BroadHop's Diotte also noted that “agility” is a term operators used a lot at the conference. “Those in marketing and operations were clearly pressured to be 100% right about campaigns because of the three- to six-month expenditure of time, not to mention investments of millions of dollars,” he said.

Rather than live under constant pressure to accurately predict the latest customer trends, marketing, development and IT folks must be able to roll out new services with the knowledge that they can tweak or remove services, or components of services according to market changes in a matter of days or hours. “One week, five dollars might be an attractive price for someone wanting a ‘social networking app’ while the next week, it might be something else. Or, on a specific day, some subscribers might be willing to pay two dollars for a sports pack highlighting key World Cup clips, whereas on another day, it might be a different event for which subscribers will pay.”

Additionally, operators these days are talking about the concepts of “cost efficiency and service mobility,” which comes from the ability to collapse multiple networks on to one policy control plane. “The issue is that you then have 2x or 3x the transactions to process, so massive scalability to the tune of 10x to 100x what we handle today is going to be the new reality,” said Diotte, explaining that transaction loads on policy servers will increase in multiple directions. “If you have a policy server handling Gx interfaces, Gy for real time charging, as well as northbound interfaces for IMS and voice over LTE [Rx interface] for value-add services, then there is an ever-increasing load of Gx, Gy and Rx to process in real time. Couple the creation of more value-add services with the collapsing of multiple networks onto the same policy platform, and it’s easy to see how transaction loads can get out of control,” said Diotte.

That type of demand for scalability can quickly compromise another need operators talk a lot about: cost certainty. Like consumers that want to track their costs and understand to what apps their money was allocated, operators need the same understanding of where their money goes when it comes to new service creation, Diotte said.