Tier 1 North American carrier selects Openet

The deployment supports more than one million transactions per second and aligns with the operator's goal to adopt architecture consistent with network functions virtualization (NFV). Virtualization enables Openet Policy Manager to elastically scale to meet the rapid growth of mobile data, and enables network updates and maintenance requirements without impacting subscriber experiences.

"This operator's immediate need for virtualized policy was twofold; elastic scalability to accommodate bandwidth demand, and to enable network maintenance and updates without service interruption," said Chris Hoover, GVP of Marketing at Openet. "By supporting virtualized infrastructure Openet helps operators decrease total costs of ownership, to improve operational performance and to drive agility in the operators' markets."

Infrastructure virtualization is an important strategy helping operators meet business objectives. Openet has incorporated substantial features within its latest policy engine to maximize the benefits of a virtualized network solution, with virtual Policy installations in over 10 datacenters serving more than 100 million customers.

"Our research has confirmed that operators are actively developing and/or seriously considering deploying NFV in their networks, a trend driven by the service velocity and simpler provisioning that NFV promises, with the mobile core identified as a key target domain," said Shira Levine, Directing Analyst, Service Enablement and Subscriber Intelligence at market research firm Infonetics Research.

"This deployment of a virtualized policy server infrastructure is a great example of how to introduce NFV concepts into a live commercial network at scale," said Gabriel Brown, Senior Analyst at Heavy Reading. "We expect many operators will follow a similar model as they look to virtualize the mobile core and prepare for a broader software-centric network strategy."

"Network functions virtualization has the potential to transform the way telecom networks are built and operated. The successful implementation of policy management by Openet at a Tier 1 wireless operator represents an important step in the validation of NFV," said Lee Doyle, Principal Analyst at Doyle Research.