Broadband Infovision Awards: Best Broadband Cloud Award

With just five weeks to go until the winners of this year’s Broadband InfoVision Awards are announced, we preview the shortlisted entries for the category Best Broadband Cloud.

This award recognises an excellent product, service, device or innovation in the area of Cloud Services by a telecom solutions vendor or a broadband operator/service provider (fixed or wireless) launched between July 2011 and June 2012 which offered significant new prospects for increased revenue, managing costs, improving quality or increasing customer satisfaction.

Swedish firm Ericsson has been shortlisted by the award judges for its Mobile Cloud Accelerator solution, designed to ensure end-to-end quality of experience for premium mobile content delivery, by combining internet acceleration and mobile prioritisation. Hence, the Mobile Cloud Accelerator provides operators with a way to monetize over-the-top (OTT) content delivery end-to-end in the way that content providers are offered a guaranteed quality of experience when their content is delivered over a mobile network.

Ericsson worked with leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) services provider Akamai to develop the solution, facilitating the connection of thousands of content providers with hundreds of operators through one single interface, the Mobile Cloud Accelerator, dramatically simplifying both technical operations and business relationships. The Mobile Cloud Accelerator is run as a service, which eliminates the need for upfront investments and opens up for new business models.

The Mobile Cloud Accelerator employs caching and prioritisation for mobile content delivery, resulting in consistently shorter page-load times for end users. Additionally, page load failures are generally eliminated, according to Ericsson. The improved user experience has a direct effect on the business value for the content providers through increased conversion rates and brand perception.

Ixia, a US provider of IP network testing solutions, has been nominated for its Data-Center Cloud Validation Suite, which enables cloud providers and enterprise customers to troubleshoot Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE), security and performance problems before they occur. The solution emulates live network conditions and traffic mixes at scale to provide relevant qualitative metrics for validating the performance of voice, video, data and web applications.

Ixia has devised a solution consisting of three of its flagship products to make a broad-based, best-in-class holistic solution for datacenter verification. The components are: IxNetwork, an end-to-end network infrastructure testing and assessment tool; IxLoad, a scalable solution for testing converged multiplay services, application delivery platforms, and security devices and systems; and IxVM, a software platform which provides complete Layer 2 to Layer 7 traffic generation and analysis for virtualised environments.

Taken together, these tools enable datacenter and network cloud providers to reduce the time needed to deploy applications in cloud, overcome cloud adoption reluctance by proving security effectiveness, reduce customer churn through greater focus on application delivery and QoE, decrease the frequency and length of service disruptions, monetize cloud services faster, and pinpoint internal data-centre bottlenecks.

US firm Procera Networks has reached the shortlist for its Intelligent Policy Enforcement (IPE) system, which is aimed at cloud operators and comprised of three platform functions: the PacketLogic Real-Time Enforcer (PRE); the PacketLogic Intelligence Center (PIC) featuring Report Studio; and the PacketLogic Subscriber Manager (PSM).

Procera’s IPE deployments for cloud services focus on enforcing the policies and commitments defined in the customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and on measuring bandwidth usage for billing purposes. Procera’s PacketLogic Report Studio is used to generate customer specific reports to assist in resolving a range of disputes including billing disputes.

The “subscribers” that the IPE tracks are a combination of cloud content and end-users, each with their own SLA, and the combined IPE system enables cloud operators to ensure that each type of customer receives the agreed level of service, including detailed billing records to manage and report on SLA performance. Detailed analytics provide the operator with the ability to better manage bandwidth, provide superior SLAs and create new and innovative business models that are geared specifically towards the user and their usage/application trends.

Finally, French firm SoftAtHome has again been shortlisted in these awards (see Broadband Home) for its CloudAtHome software solution, which provides operators with an easy-to-deploy software solution on both managed and retail devices that make it simpler for subscribers to transparently access and control content distributed between the home devices and the cloud. And since all the services are exposed as Web Services, they can be accessed by any device running HTML5 including set-top boxes, connected TV, mobiles and tablets through a new unified user experience.

CloudAtHome is made up of two main components: a cloud-based component that is deployed in an operator’s network, backing up up home content, aggregating content coming from the backup and from the network, and preparing it for access by different devices; and a home-based component that can be deployed on different managed devices in the home (including the home gateway and set-top boxes) depending on the operator’s choice and strategy.

The home-based component contains all the home-based features that are best hosted on the home side, including the following services: aggregation of content coming from different devices in the home LAN using DLNA technology; preparation for cloud back up with privacy and profiling rules; and preparation for access of content in the cloud by multiple and different home devices.

For more information on this year Broadband InfoVision Awards and to register, please visit http://www.broadbandworldforum.com/awards/about-the-awards/