As featured in TM Froum’s Inside Revenue Management newsletter
There is no doubt that policy management was the hot topic in the revenue management world of 2011. The increasingly sophisticated (sometimes complex) requirements of data packaging and the desire to be able to offer customers a wide range of choice, voice/data combinations and service bundles has been driving the need for tools that can help manage this.
While there are a number of policy management specialist vendors in the market, many offer additional capabilities such as integrated charging, and most offer flexible interfaces to help integrate their offerings with existing charging, rating and network infrastructures. This has led to a number of merger and acquisition activities as key players look to bolster their own product sets.
The result is that policy management has become a heavily contested space and has led to quite a bit of market research into what is being sought after by operators. In the space of three months, Heavy Reading has released two reports on the subject, sponsored by two competing suppliers that have two quite opposing findings. Readers hoping to gain some insight for their own decision making process may come away none the wiser.
The first report headlined in October 2011 with “Research Shows Overwhelming Demand for Integrated Charging and Policy Management Solutions to Address Data Monetization Challenge.” The report, sponsored by Amdocs, went on to say that the recent rise in new data price plans was being driven by the need for service providers to offer customers an improved data experience and to better monetize their investments in network capacity. It also stated that the majority of service providers worldwide planned to introduce family data plans in the next year, and currently lacked the capabilities to enable them.
The research was based on 64 “qualitative” interviews with decision makers in director, VP or CEO roles from 32 service providers from across Europe (13), North America (9) and Asia-Pacific (10) -- from both IT and marketing departments -- conducted between May and July 2011.
Key among the findings was that 80% of respondents did not think their existing policy management systems, deployed to support network-related use cases (bandwidth management, fair usage, bill shock) could support more advanced use cases, such as data plans across multiple lines of business, payment methods and spend limits, and more; and that 10% had tried to integrate charging and policy management systems and failed.