Continuing to expand its end-to-end IP portfolio, Genband this week tapped Procera Networks as a partner to add deep packet inspection (DPI) platform capabilities. Genband will OEM Procera’s PacketLogic platform as the Genband P Series, in line with the vendor’s product naming schemes. To add some additional weight behind the partnership, Genband CEO Charlie Vogt agreed to join the Procera Board.
From Genband’s press release on the deal, the new DPI product will…
…help operators decrease network congestion, eliminate malware or non-compliant applications and lay the foundation to deliver a wide range of new communication applications that significantly improve the subscriber experience and increase service providers’ network efficiency.
Connected Planet’s Take, Rich Karpinski:
Genband is on a roll — and on mission to fill out its end-to-end IP portolio, driven of course by its recently-closed acquisition of Nortel’s carrier VoIP business. No longer satisfied to go after pieces of the IP/IMS puzzle — such as media gateways or SBCs — it’s not surprising to see the vendor pull in a DPI platform, a technology area missing up to now from its road map, admitted Natasha Tamaskar, Genband vice president of product marketing and management, but an “an important component of our mobile broadband solutions,” she said in a quick email exchange following the announcement.
The Procera platform was surely appealing for being built on much the same ACTA server roots that Genband is constructing its own end-to-end IP capabilities. The vendor believes the openness and scalability of that ACTA core will play an important role in central office modernization (ie, the CO as a green, standards-based data center), a key theme it is pushing as it deliver its new, more ambitious product directions.
DPI tools — along with policy capabilities, which may require another partnership of OEM deal by Genband — are absolutely critical to the kinds of mobile opportunities Genband’s Tamaskar referenced. Mobile operators are building their core and radio infrastructures as rapidly as possible but are also deploying DPI/policy pairs to implement rules-based congestion and usage management schemes — as rapidly and as creatively as possible.
