With the ability to embed the BFX Broadband Policy Gateway within vendor’s own product offering, it is possible to gain a clear and immediate competitive advantage in any head-to-head situation with competitors. With BFX on-board, vendors can showcase a flexible and controllable connectivity capability straight out-of-the-box. This will not only help to be more competitive by increasing product compliancy and speeding up deployments, but also improve on project margins and lead-times, by reducing distracting customization efforts.
There is a significant opportunity as well as mounting pressure on product vendors to help mobile operators to launch new, differentiating services in order to be successful in mobile broadband. This puts an additional requirement on vendors to implement cross-system connectivity to products from different vendors, often proprietary and sometimes even direct competitors.
Multi-vendor and customer-specific connectivity is costly to implement and very time consuming to maintain. With BroadForward’s Broadband Policy Gateway BFX, vendors can achieve much higher levels of competitiveness through enhanced compliance to connectivity requirements. BFX provides vendors with a specialised software toolkit for advanced integration of their products with any mobile broadband, policy control, charging or IT system. BFX offers significant reduction of deployment project cost and lead-times, by reducing customization efforts. In many cases the price for BFX will be lower than the cost of a single change request on the vendor’s core product.
As competition between vendors heats up, so will the impact on margins and efficiencies. Most operators will only have a limited number of vendors selected to help them achieve their goals. This will depend on how successful these vendors are in convincing their product can actually make a difference in generating revenue or at least offer significant efficiency gains. Next to that, the selection process will undoubtedly go beyond what individual products promise to deliver. Interoperability between the different systems within the data and control plane is a key requirement for the operator to be able to achieve the mentioned revenue and profitability goals.
Precisely this interoperability requirement is identified as the single biggest operator challenge by research analyst Heavy Reading (in their report “Mobile Broadband & the Rise of Policy”). It is therefore important that vendors can deal with this requirement. Not only now, but in a future-proof way.
There is enormous competitive advantage to be achieved if the product has the ability to easily connect and interface to any type of system in the data and control plane, even those of direct competitors. In addition, vendors will need to be able to show their product is ready for the future, providing the flexibility and speed of configuring for new use cases straightaway. Vendors should be able to do this without having to delay crucial roadmap commitments caused by customer-specific integration and development work.