Openet and Cisco

The very strong and successful partnership of Openet and Cisco started over 6 years ago, where both companies first collaborated in providing a solution for a major Tier 1 US mobile operator. The combination of Openet’s Convergent Mediation and Charging solutions with Cisco’s Cisco Mobile eXchange (CMX) suite of products proved from the outset to be a formidable force in providing service providers with the ability to perform real-time content service delivery and charging – at the network edge.

Since that early engagement, which was the first integration of a CSG worldwide by a 3rd party, the Cisco-Openet partnership has continued to grow upon its successes. To date, there have been many deployments of the joint solution to leading service providers worldwide. In particular, the solution is in production at the top 5 of the world’s largest wireless operators across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Its notable that approximately 50% of all CSG deployments worldwide are in conjunction with Openet’s mediation and charging solution.

Over the years the partnership has matured to a point where there is joint solution design and pre-release certification of products, while offering a single prime interface to customers for professional service delivery, for roll-out and follow-up support and maintenance. Indeed, ongoing roadmap collaboration and exchange is a hallmark of the relationship, where Openet is a Cisco Technology Development Partner. Both companies provide innovative and industry leading products in their respective fields. Cisco, the worldwide leader in IP-based networking solutions, offers the CMX suite of products containing the Content Services Gateway (CSG).The CSG provides the ability to control

Openet provides a real-time, scalable, flexible, network-driven, bidirectional, online and offline charging mediation platform. A truly convergent charging environment spanning all types of service, payment methods and is network agnostic. When combined with Cisco CMX it enables service providers to offer data services to all subscribers regardless of payment method or access technology.

However, the huge success enjoyed by this partnership is equally driven from the vast functional and domain knowledge that Cisco-Openet possesses – nobody understands the real-time content charging space better than we do. This is further backed up by the track record of successful delivery of working solutions to our many customers.

In the early days the focus has been to devise solutions to implement charging policies for the rich set of emerging content-based data services. Here policy enforcement was based on user authentication, service classification and balance management which dictated whether a user could be authorised to access a service or not. With the complexity and range of services being launched today on the back of widespread availability of broadband internet access, there is unrelenting demand on the service provider’s network to provide real-time service delivery of precious bandwidth resources. This demand drives a need to broaden the scope of policy definition. Policy requirements now extend beyond charging to encompass access control (e.g. Spending Limits), resource control (e.g. bandwidth, Quality of Service) and routing control (e.g. flow gating and content filtering) among others.

Looking at the explosion in P2P applications in recent years it poses a major headache to the service provider of today. With these new P2P services (kazaa, and bitTorrent for example) we see an imbalance in the consumption of available network bandwidth. Its common for service providers to report that a small percentage of their subscribers are able to use the majority of the network resources, with the majority of their subscribers facing unpredictable network performance. Add to this the difficulty in classifying and applying differential charges to such applications and you’ll see the net result is that the cost of providing the broadband service and infrastructure is spiralling upwards, while the revenues per subscriber are deceasing.

It is evident that the need for far reaching policy control to rebalance the situation and to equitably control bandwidth allocation is paramount. Differential QoS allocation and charging across subscribers and applications will redress the balance and increase the revenue stream. The ability to classify the P2P applications has proven most difficult due to the complex and proprietary nature of the involved protocols. However, with the Cisco product suite’s ability to perform such classification and bandwidth management, coupled with Openet’s policy control solution, we bring the control back into the domain of the service provider.

The demand for far reaching policy control dictates a centralised policy management and enforcement architecture which delivers dynamic real-time transactional policy decisions for charging, resource and routing requests – supporting very large volumes with low latency transaction turnaround.

The Cisco-Openet partnership is very well placed to lead the way in meeting the challenges of such policy control demands.  The Cisco-Openet policy management offering delivers a pre-integrated and tightly knit solution based on the already proven FusionWorks and CMX platforms. Derived

Therefore in choosing Cisco-Openet the value to the customer is not only derived from the outstanding products on offer today, but also from the innovation, leadership and vast reservoir of knowledge and experience at their disposal in applying our joint product offerings to solve their business problems of today and into the future.