IHS reveals top policy management vendors

Policy Management Market and VNF
IHS, a top analyst firm, has revealed the name of the leading policy management vendors for 2015.

Huawei and Ericsson are leading the global policy management market based on their revenue in 2015. Cisco has achieved strong growth last year, said IHS.

The market for policy management solutions reached $1.6 billion in 2015, with growth driven largely by wireless momentum.

The report said telecom operators are making investment in policy management solutions in order to improve their data monetization efforts. The investment in policy charging and rules function (PCRF) and policy system replacement are expected to support voice over LTE (VoLTE) services of telecom network operators.

The market for policy deployed as a virtual network function (VNF) is forecast to reach $2.8 billion by 2020, representing 90 percent of the total policy management market.

The IHS report said smaller telecom operators will be continuing their investment in the deployment of policy management via a cloud‑based software-as-a-service (SaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model in the next few years.

Policy management is closely linked with telecom network operators’ investment in the customer experience management (CEM) software that supports mobile service providers for offering more creative and targeted services to their subscribers and prospects.

Shira Levine, research director, service enablement and subscriber intelligence, IHS Technology, said there is growing interest in pushing policy control to the device as a tool for subscriber engagement, enabling self‑care, targeted offers and promotions, etc.

IHS said wireless revenue as a percentage of the entire policy management market is projected to increase over the next several years, while growth in the more mature fixed-line market will be slower.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) are poised to be key drivers behind policy management growth, with many operators opting to deploy a separate policy management stack to support these new lines of business.

Baburajan K