So as the new General Manager of the Policy Business unit I’m often asked “what is policy”. Policy Management traditionally refers to the rules, applications and processes that regulate a network and traffic flows. From a Sonus perspective the features and application that allows service providers or enterprises to apply policies to voice flows and voice traffic reside on the Sonus PSX. Examples of this type of functionality are : “no SIP Sessions from this IP address”, “SIP sessions only between 5 and 10pm”, “Add a 1 to this string of digits if it comes from this geographic region”, etc.

So why is this important for enterprises and for service providers?

Enterprises are migrating to SIP and Unified Communications. In this move they are starting to see more traffic and different types of SIP traffic on their internal network. This is leading to increased bandwidth usage and to potential performance degradations. This problem is typically made worse in enterprises which consist of multi- vendor networks – each vendor with their own version of quality of service and policy management. In order to be able to efficiently police the network, enforce policies, and keep the network supporting their business needs as the network moves to Unified Communications CIOs should be focusing on being more efficient with their network policies and managing them with a vendor agnostic, central SIP session policy management tool.

Service Providers are moving to VoLTE and to IMS and increasing their network traffic both from the RAN and in the core of their networks. Additionally – they are looking to start providing new services based on a combination of subscriber, application or network-based rules across mobile and fixed broadband networks. With proper bandwidth management, Service Providers can avoid over-provisioning capacity on their networks (and realize OPEX savings). The way to make the move to mobile and new services while keeping network costs manageable is by leveraging a centralized SIP session policy framework.

Due to market and technology trends policy is becoming more important in both the enterprise and service provider arenas. The role of policy is evolving to become a tool to deliver new services and save costs. Forward looking companies are actively looking at their policy needs to get ready for Unified Communications and the evolution of SIP.