Brocade and Viavi join hands for new subscriber data analytics solution

Brocade and Viavi have produced a joint solution designed to enable mobile operators to capture subscriber data analytics for thousands of users in near real-time to resolve quality of experience issues.

The product partnership was developed at the request of a tier-one mobile operator in the U.S., according to Daniel Williams, principal director for product marketing for data center routing, network visibility and analytics at Brocade. The mobile operator was already using solutions from both Brocade and Viavi in its network, Williams said, but was seeking a better way to ensure it was meeting service-level agreements for high-value enterprise customers. Identifying VIP customers within the network and ensuring good quality of experience for them is no easy task, Williams noted.

“When you think about it, in a mobile network with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users, the number of VIPs will be a fraction of that – but still on the order of thousands,” he said. “That’s a big challenge for anyone, particularly when you think about the amount of data that goes across these networks.”

Typically, Williams said, operators can opt to capture all customer data, all the time – presenting huge issues for the cost of storage and compute power – and then pull the data from storage for analytics. But that approach can’t be done in real-time, he said. Williams added the mobile network operator customer had explored other real-time subscriber data analytics solutions, but due to network speeds and the large amounts of data involved, other offerings could only identify and capture data from a limited number of subscribers, from a few hundred to as few as a dozen subscribers. The joint solution is said to support up to 6,000 subscribers simultaneously per solution instance, a scale Williams said is industry leading.