In a new survey of service providers, Openet, Tekelec and Huawei were most often named by service providers as the top policy-management vendors.
That's just one finding in Infonetics Research's "Policy Management Deployment Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey," which provides insights into the investment drivers, strategies and integration efforts of operators deploying policy-management solutions, as well as their thoughts on leading policy vendors.
"We've long maintained that the balance of power within operators in making policy management investment decisions is shifting, and our latest policy survey bears this out," noted Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics Research. "Increasingly, operators view policy as a key tool for service creation and customer management that extends well beyond basic bandwidth control, and as a result their marketing departments are taking a larger role in the policy management procurement process."
The report revealed that delivering new service bundles and raising revenue per user are the top business factors driving respondent operators' policy management investments.
Reducing network congestion was rated a "very important" business driver by fewer respondents this year than last year, suggesting that operators are more likely to view policy management as a tool for service creation and new revenue, the research firm said.
Nearly all (96 percent) of the operators surveyed rated rules-engine flexibility as the top criterion for choosing a policy-management solution, indicating a strong interest in easy-to-use interfaces that enable policy definition and creation without vendor involvement.
Infonetics interviewed 25 service providers from all over the globe for its report.