Survey Sez: Wireless Will Drive Policy-Management Market

According to Infonetics Research’s Shira Levine, “More and more operators are using policy solutions to generate revenue from new services and to optimize the subscriber experience, as opposed to using policy control as a stick to restrict subscribers’ usage of their networks.”

Having said that, her group forecasts the global policy-management market to top $1.9 billion by 2016. The majority of policy management spending is in the wireless market, and many operators in more developed markets continue to make policy vendor selections in conjunction with Long Term Evolution trials and deployments.

Levine continues, “As policy management’s applications broaden, we’ll see continued strong growth in the market over the next several years along with additional vendor consolidation as the market matures.”

More Infonetics policy findings:

>> Global sales of policy management software hit $589 million 2011, up 41 percent from the previous year.
>> A growing number of policy deployments are being made to address near-term concerns and specific pain points like network congestion, the desire to deliver value-added services, and the need to comply with regulatory requirements.
>> Openet ended 2011 as Number One in the policy-management-software market once again, followed by Huawei, Tekelec and Amdocs (formerly Bridgewater Systems). Infonetics anticipates vendor marketshare shifts in 2012, due in large part to mergers and acquisitions, particularly Amdocs’ 2011 acquisition of Bridgewater.
>> Operators will use policy management to launch new capabilities via secure APIs with third-parties, including guaranteed video quality for streaming video for over-the-top providers.
>> The skyrocketing number of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections during the next several years will drive growth in the policy-management market as operators use policy solutions to identify, track, and manage M2M traffic.