New virtualization deployment options for Amdocs network control products
will lower costs, improve scalability and accelerate introduction of new service models
At TM Forum’s Management World 2013,Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), the leading provider of customer experience systems and services, today announced the industry’s first complete, virtualized network control offering. The new virtualized deployment options for Amdocs’ suite of network control products enable service providers to accelerate the introduction of new services while taking full advantage of standard off-the-shelf hardware to reduce costs. The virtualization solution will be supported on key Amdocs network control products widely deployed today, including Amdocs Policy Controller (PCRF), Amdocs Home Subscriber Server, and Amdocs Subscriber Data Broker.
Amdocs’ modular, virtualized environments offer service providers improved elasticity around performance and scalability at a lower cost by breaking the traditional linkage between function and hardware. This virtualized environment — characterized by distributed software architecture, self-contained application clusters with no scale limitations, and no dependency on centralized session/state storage — also enables easy expansion, operation and in-service upgrades.
In addition to these key benefits around performance and scalability, Amdocs’ virtualized network control solutions will enhance service agility, allowing for rapid introduction of services that can be targeted at specific subscribers and/or geographies (such as enterprise, mobile virtual network operator and machine-to-machine) including dynamic quality of service on demand. Consistent with Amdocs’ approach, these products offer multi-network support and extensive interoperability with network elements, enabling ease of deployment in mixed vendor heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments.
“Control plane applications, such as policy servers, subscriber databases, and IMS, will be among the first virtualized 4G core functions to be implemented in commercial mobile networks,” said Gabriel Brown, senior analyst at Heavy Reading. “By starting with the control plane, operators are able to establish new architectures and networking models that will incorporate more virtualized applications in the future, and in time play a role in broader telecom cloud and software-defined network strategies.”
“As part of the first complete virtualized network control plane suites to reach the market, our elastic policy control solution will drive down ongoing costs and enable faster time to market for new service offerings,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, Amdocs vice president for product and solutions marketing. “Following the introduction of Amdocs Elastic Online Charging and certification of our Customer Experience Systems portfolio on VMware as part of our latest CES 9 release, this announcement extends our plans to continue to invest in virtualizing our solutions in order to extend these benefits to our customers.”