Tekelec CTO on DPI Plans

Following the acquisition of Camiant, Tekelec CTO, Vince Lesch, was interviewed to Rich Karpinski of conected planet (full story - here). He was asked about their DPI plans (which may seem like the next step in Tekelec evolution):

CP: Policy server vendors like Camiant often go to market almost side by side with a deep packet inspection, or DPI, vendor. Is that an area of interest in terms of acquisition or partnerships or are there parts of your performance monitoring portfolio of probes, etc, that provide those types of traffic inspection capabilities?

Lesch: In many ways the probes of our performance monitoring systems do have a lot of similar capabilities or can get certainly get to the visibility that a DPI box does. Those devices of course today are passive devices and don’t have policy enforcement capabilities. Certainly in the near term, our focus is on this network intelligence layer, not necessarily being in the data path or being in that control. One of the great things we liked as well about Camiant, and it’s similar to the philosophy we have, is being the neutral third-party, the Switzerland let’s say, where they are not associated with any network element but they have to interoperate with many, many network elements. That level of neutrality we think is an advantage and we’ll continue to support the interoperability partners they had. I think they had one of the largest interoperability ecosystems; that will help differentiate the product in the space moving forward against potential competitors.

See my related post, "PCRF - DPI (as PCEF) Compatibility Matrix" (here) and note that Camiant is the only PCRF vendor that has already integrated its product with all major DPI vendors (Allot. Arbor, Cisco, Procera and Sandvine).