CSPs want more than just congestion management from policy servers

Service providers no longer have the patience or time to wait for their policy vendors to make changes. As customer demands change, CSPs need to put products into place that are personalized.

If a marketing person wants to launch a parental control service where Facebook is shut off from a child’s phone from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, he doesn’t want an IT person telling him it’ll take 6 to 8 weeks to accommodate.

As a result, “2011 will be a year of more flex policy platforms” according to Dan Geiger, senior marketing director, Broadhop, which released today its study “The New Policy Paradigm: Apps, Not Pipes.”

Where the focus traditionally has been on congestion management and protecting networks, CSPs want policy servers and policy solutions that enable a lot more—especially productivity in working with third-party app developers when creating personalized services around location, parental controls and social networking.

Rather than be burdened with a hardware-centric solution that can’t change dynamically, CSPs increasingly demand “change-ability” in terms of policies that can be instantly morphed to accommodate marketing’s dreams for new products and services: “If a premium customer wants support for Skype over the top at a certain QoS, then marketers need to work well with apps and app developers,” noted Geiger. In what Geiger calls the “policy 1.0 world," that was difficult, but now becoming more possible, as marketing and business users within CSPs are pushing IT to help them prioritize new offerings and monetize services.

Making it happen

As operators move to 4G and LTE, the ability to scale and the ability to open up to third-party app developers are critical components, among others.

“Scale is paramount, as there will be tens of millions of subscribers that need to not only be supported, but that need personalization,” said Geiger. That requires a robust platform that helps the operator treat each customer as a targeted and valued person.

Second is “virtualization.” Virtualized policy platforms are more efficient, in that they enable executions of software in an environment separated from underlying hardware resources.

Third, the ability for CSP developers to work within the ECLIPSE Open Source developers environment will enable them to go in and change CSP policies rapidly, as opposed to having a vendor do it for them. “The ECLIPSE interfaces can dictate a service goes on at 6 pm and off at 8 pm, but the vendor has to provide a tool that enables you to do that in a day or in hours as opposed to weeks,” said Geiger.

Fourth, Open APIs come via “RESTful” interfaces—a standard for web developers that helps non-telecom folks provide apps (e.g., Skype or Web X or location services). “You want to work with the cool web folks, so you can’t limit your work to just telecom gurus. You need the optimal level of abstraction to enable third parties.”

With those core elements in place, Geiger said service providers can better position themselves as attractive partners to innovative third parties, a key to building more personalized and useful services that go beyond the scope of traditional offerings.