Policy: Getting a Handle on Bandwidth, Personalization and the Customer Experience

It's a new service world. Online, on-demand and on-the-go, today's communications customers expect personalized offerings, ubiquitous access and broad choices, driving ever more bandwidth usage while they're at it. This new world of unlimited customer choice requires new strategies for managing the customer experience and monetizing data usage in a way that works for the long term. And the linchpin of those strategies is policy control.

While policy is not new, integrating policy around charging, rating, subscriber data and promotions represents a fresh approach to traditional policy implementations. By taking a holistic approach that combines the subscriber, network and applications, a new policy paradigm helps CSPs manage the policy-related challenges of the data and video services explosion.

An integrated approach allows operators to manage costs, monetize usage, differentiate applications and improve the customer experience. Ultimately, this strategy supports innovation with confidence, new business models and personalized services that satisfy customers and generate new revenue streams. The result – less network congestion, increased revenue and enhanced customer loyalty.

In this session, you will learn how to integrate policy across subscribers, networks and applications, what the challenges are and how to leverage the approach for the following:

• Gain insight into the key drivers
• Understand personalized service offers
• Effectively manage network and subscriber resources
• Deliver compelling promotions
• Evaluate solutions for policy management

Sponsored by:

Speakers:
Jeff Edlund, Chief Technologist Futures, HP Communications & Media Solutions
Jeff Edlund is the CTO of HP's Communications & Media Solutions Business Unit. Jeff provides thought leadership around Innovation and the Innovation process, HP Labs research and its application to solving customer problems and participates in HP's strategy and M&A activities for our Service Provider Customers. Jeff previously served as the Chief Technologist for HP's Communications Media & Entertainment field sales organization assigned to Sprint. Prior to HP, Jeff was a core member of the Telecom practice at Compaq for 5 years. Prior to Compaq, Jeff had a 5 year career with Tandem Computers. Jeff's last assignment at Tandem was the Technical Team Leader responsible for Tandem's quality of solution deliver to Sprint from 1993 to 1998. Jeff received a certificate of Engineering from Control Data Institute and graduated from Hartford University with a BS in Computer Science.

Shira Levine, Directing Analyst, Infonetics Research, Inc.
As the Directing Analyst, Next Gen OSS and Policy for Infonetics, Shira Levine authors several Infonetics equipment market size and forecast reports on policy servers, service delivery platform (SDP) software and services, and subscriber data management (SDM) software and services, as well as an ongoing series of Continuous Research Service (CRS) notes and surveys on important communication industry players, technologies, and service provider trends. Prior to Infonetics Research, Shira was the Senior Analyst in IDC's Next-Generation OSS and Billing Program. As a senior research analyst with Stratecast's OSS Competitive Strategies practice, she covered the OSS/BSS market and service providers' OSS strategies and requirements. Before becoming an analyst, Shira was Executive Editor of America's Network magazine.She was also the Editor of Telecom Investor and senior editor at Telephony magazine. Levine holds a BA in Classics from Amherst College and an MSJ from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.