Optimise, contextualise, personalise
Operators that can’t access and provide contextual information about users will be drowned by the tide of data and content traffic across their networks, according to Ken Denman, CEO of Openwave.
Denman said that pushing the old buttons of adding more radios, more cell sites, and splitting carriers, will not work for operators. Instead they will need to know, and be able to provide to partners, much more contextual information about the user – to be able to provide personalized, and network-optimised, customer experiences.
“We’re very much on the verge of the next big thing, and the bubble is about to burst. In three to four years 60% of the devices on the network will be something other than phones, and 70% of the content will be video based in some form or other,” he said.
“That’s a huge challenge for this industry – and to answer it it has got to get hold of context. That’s the user info, the social and demographic information, location, and bundle that into personalized subscriber billing plans. Rapidly we are seeing that context is now king.”
Openwave is positioning itself as a provider of back-end network optimisation information and policy management platforms – allowing operators to create personalised pricing plans and other offers based on a user’s contextual profile.
It announced general availability of two products today to address that area. The first is Openwave Smart Policy, a context-aware policy management solution designed to help operators monitor and manage network utilisation at a user, device and application. The second is its Optimisation ROI Calculator – a tool help operators calculate the estimated cost savings for web and media optimisation opportunities.
Policy management is a hot topic at the moment, with a coterie of dedicated players, as well as the traditional OSS and NEP providers targeting the sector. Network intelligence is also being stitched together by signaling companies such as Tekelec, as well as companies in the network management area such as Tektronix.
As for video optimisation allied to advanced charging capabilities, this is something that companies such as Byte Mobile and Flash Networks also target. So how does Openwave see itself as playing in these areas?
Denman said that by using data from its traffic mediation and messaging platforms, Openwave is able to present contextual information to operators in a massively scaleable way.
“Essentially we sit in the data path doing mediation of the IP traffic,” he said. “That puts us not just in the position of encoding and transcoding content, but we can provide analytics from multiple network inputs at a per-user and device level, as well as provide the back end integration,” he said.