Operators are increasingly turning to the virtualisation of policy management systems as a means of addressing issues with scalability and flexibility, new research has claimed.
A report from IHS said requests for proposals and requests for information are dominated by virtualisation in the developed world. It said the market for policy deployed as a virtual network function will account for 90 percent of the policy management market by 2020 and will be worth $2.8 billion.
The policy management solution market was worth $1.6 billion last year, thanks to momentum in the wireless services market. Mobile operators used it for data monetisation as well as the deployment of policy charging and rules function and policy system replacement to support voice over LTE.
Shira Levine, Research Director for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at IHS Technology, said there had been momentum in deploying policy management as a cloud-based software as a service or platform as a service model. However, while this trend was predicted to intensify over the coming years, Levine said this was largely common among smaller operators.
“Policy is becoming closely linked with the larger concept of customer experience management (CEM) by providing operators a way to offer their subscribers and prospects more creative and targeted services that are consistent across multiple delivery mechanisms and end-user devices,” she said.
“As this occurs, there is growing interest in pushing policy control to the device as a tool for subscriber engagement, enabling self‑care, targeted offers and promotions, etc.”
Levine also predicted the Internet of Things would become a key driver of future policy management growth, as operators choose to roll out a separate stack to support this line of business.
The report hailed Huawei and Ericsson as the two biggest players in policy management revenue, but noted strong growth from Cisco.