The next generation of policy management solutions has evolved to address the challenges associated with increased broadband consumption and a wider range of end-user devices, Infonetics Research said in a new report.
“This shift has translated into significant changes in the policy management vendor landscape as suppliers look to refine and reposition their offerings,” said Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics.
“There are new buyers for policy management within the operators and new requirements that policy solutions must address, and this has created challenges for many suppliers playing in the market—a trend that we expect to continue in the coming years,” said Levine.
The study was based on interviews with representatives of 23 service providers in Asia Pacific, Latin America, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa that have deployed policy management solutions or plan to by the end of 2015.
When asked to identify the top policy management vendors, survey respondents put Huawei at the top of the list. Ericsson came in second, and Openet and Oracle tied for third.
Topping respondents’ criteria for choosing a policy management solution are reliability and performance scalability.
While only 13% of respondents are currently running policy management software as a virtual network function (VNF), 57% plan to do so by the end of 2016.
Also, 32% of operators surveyed plan to deploy policy via a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform by the end of 2016.