Product Description
This report surveys the State of the Art from the perspective of suppliers’ offerings. A.R.G. invited a wide range of suppliers including established NEPs and IT technology firms, to policy and charging specialists. We studied each against the established requirements and the architecture set out in our framework report “The Role of Policy in the Telco Cloud”. It is the product of significant research, with suppliers, CSPs and industry associations. A large number of the suppliers profiled herein are taking steps to simplify the creation of new monetization plans for new product offers – from data plans, to applications, XaaS, and other product offers that require coordination of data flows, APNs/addresses, and charging rules/balances. There is a significant trend to supporting some combination of mobile, Fixed and Cable with a single PCRF, with common plans where possible (adapted to the specifics for various networks’ PCEFs). Most suppliers are also simplifying the plan creation interface, providing a unified GUI (often fronting the Enterprise Product/Service Catalog) with “safe” parameterization and/or validity checking. Supplier assessment if provided for Aria, Alcatel-Lucent now Nokia, Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, IBM, NEC NetCracker, Oracle, and Redknee.