Orange Poland virtualizes business and customer support systems to compete in digital market
Openet, Ireland’s largest privately held tech firm that develops software for telecom service providers, recently announced Orange Poland, a Polish telecommunications provider, has started using virtualized versions of its policy manager and evolved charging tools.
Openet provides software solutions and consulting services that enable service providers to respond to customers quickly. Orange Poland contracted with Openet to provide virtualized policy management and charging solutions as part of its business support systems (BSS) and customer engagement solutions.
Openet’s policy manager is a network policy management tool that allows users to control and optimize network resources. The Openet evolved charging solution is a convergent charging solution that allows new networks functions to be launched automatically. The company has partnered with several services provides as part of its partnership program, including T-Mobile, Sprint, BT, Bell and most recently, Orange Poland.
Orange Poland is the largest mobile operator in Poland competing alongside other telecom heavyweights like T-Mobile. Although, the two companies do share their radio access networks in a joint venture called NetWorks! Orange Poland said it needed to upgrade its BBS solutions to be more agile with the push toward virtualization.
“We need to be able to compete and win in the digital marketplace,” said Krzysztof Kozlowski, platforms and convergent network development director at Orange Poland. “This means that we must have the agility to be able to react very quickly and cost-effectively to any new market opportunities. Having policy and charging with pre-packaged use cases gives us the edge we need to best serve our customers today, but also to be able to move quickly to roll out new services in the future.”
In April, another Orange subsidiary known as Orange Egypt, a leading Egyptian operator, deployed Openet’s real-time offer manager (RTOM) solution. Gerry Donohoe, Openet’s technical director, told RCR Wireless News integration can make the deployment of these types of products a challenge.
“Integration is a key concern, the Policy and Charging Control (PCC) solution must be able to easily integrate with a combination of network components, billing and business support systems – possibly from a variety of vendors,” he said. “Depending on the operator and what it has in place already, there may be a capex hit at the start of the virtualization process, as they invest in general purpose hardware. There may also be a need for a different skills sets within an operator if moving from legacy system to solutions using virtualization on Commercial of The Shelf (COTs) hardware.”
