Policy Is NFV’s Pacesetter
May 30, 2013 - Aleks
When France Télécom - Orange Director of Technical Strategy Yves Bellego told Light Readingthat "network control equipment" such as the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) servers would be the first to benefit from network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments, that would have been music to the ears of the team at Openet Telecom Ltd.
The Irish Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) vendor has been developing its policy control platform with NFV-type set-ups and software-defined networking (SDN) architectures in mind for a while, and believes it's ahead of the pack as a result.
It announced Wednesday that it has demonstrated its advanced NFV capabilities with an unidentified Tier 1 operator, claiming that it has successfully demonstrated "linear and scalable policy solutions" at that operator.
It added: "For several years, Openet has supported virtualized environments for functional nodes, but providing automated elasticity within high performance stateful systems was a more difficult, technical challenge."
And in boasting of its progress, the company has taken a dig at its PCRF rivals. "Openet's head start in virtualization enables us to demonstrate as reality today what others only have as a roadmap."
Others? That would be a clear dig at Amdocs Ltd. and Tekelec, among others.
What this tells us is not so much that Openet has a technical advantage over some of its main rivals (which, in some respects, it may) but that there is clearly a scramble among the main PCRF vendors to be seen to be in the vanguard of NFV developments.
And any telco policy server vendor that isn't plowing R&D and marketing dollars and euros into NFV-related efforts right now is already behind the curve.
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