We're big proponents here of developing innovative, next-generation solutions that enable global mobile operators to successfully tackle the data crunch clogging their networks. It's not enough anymore to buy and deploy expensive, bulky inline solutions to optimize multimedia, as operators have increasingly realized. By embracing SDN (software-defined networking) and disruptive, cloud-based architecture, operators can more flexibly tackle multimedia optimization and quickly create new virtualized services ”in the cloud” to deploy to their end users. "Freedom" just might be an interesting framework here.
“Freedom” is what operators gain from deploying these new software-defined networking and cloud-based service architectures. SDN provides the freedom to monetize the network in new ways; freedom to imagine and then rapidly create new service offerings; freedom to manage more precisely the activity occurring on their networks; and freedom to expand to LTE scale while taming both CapEx and OpEx costs.
To illustrate:
(1) Monetization: Operators increasingly will move to complex charging bundles and marketing offerings around QoE and selective content access. With a flexible, cloud-based policy enforcement option, these operators can quickly innovate and provision policy enforcement around different subscriber and publisher offerings. A flexible, scriptable policy engine can allow policy enforcement to select how to optimize multimedia traffic, whether by time of day; regions; particular device types; rate plans; or congestion conditions.
(2) Creation of new services: Operators need the freedom to imagine disruptive new services, and still sleep at night knowing that the network is safe and secure. By combining intelligent steering and DPI in the network with cloud compute farms, operators can experiment with novel offerings such as - for instance - an entry-level data plan with unlimited video, yet one which is capped at a ceiling bit rate and resolution, with upsell for limited periods of higher QoE. In an SDN world of the near future, where much of the operator network moves to inexpensive off-the-shelf compute and virtualization in the cloud, Skyfire is the only cloud-based, virtualizable optimization platform that is ready to plug into the SDN architectures of the future.
(3) Network Management: The new breed of cloud-based services also provides freedom from network bottlenecks, and allows operators to regain control over the floods of OTT data traffic surging across those networks. Understanding, and having the ability to optimize, all video formats streaming through networks – whether adaptive or mobile-friendly – is a new freedom available to operators who choose to deploy cloud-based services on top of their existing infrastructure.
(4) Reduced capacity planning/OpEx: Cloud-based optimization services take advantage of "five-nines" data center cluster uptimes, and yet enjoy “fail-open” architectures where at moments of downtime, network traffic flows without subscriber interruption, as it did before adding optimization. Cloud services exploit COTS hardware rather than proprietary appliances, and rely on intelligent steering likely already in network routers and load balancers (but which are under-utilized). Because SDN and cloud-based architecture is easily interoperable with intelligent steering capabilities that are already present in most networks, it drastically reduces the need for an operator to invest in new inline elements as traffic scales.
We're obviously not beyond invoking revolutionary jargon to illustrate our commitment to disruption and the busting of paradigms. To miss the wave of potential service creation and optimization opportunities as data and video traffic explodes is simply not in the Skyfire DNA.