What's Behind Sandvine's "we are 1-2 years ahead of competition in service creation" Statement?

In its recent earning call, Sandvine CEO, David Caputo [pictured] stated that "we believe we are ahead of folks on service creation… don't know what investments they are making… i suspect we are a year to two years ahead of folks" (see "Sandvine Q2 Conference Call Notes" by douglasm, here).

Sandvine defines service creation as "Enhance the Internet experience while unlocking new revenue opportunities with personalized value-added services. Service Creation helps operators better meet subscribers’ needs by deploying tier-based or targeted service plans that retain existing customers and attract new ones".

As all DPI vendors offer and sell such solutions to mobile and fixed operators world-wide, I asked Sandvine what make their more advanced compared to others. 

Here's what Dan Deeth told me:

I think there are a number of areas where we are well ahead of our competitors, but three spring to mind immediately:

• Direct Gy integration – Because we interface over Gy directly with an OCS, rather than via an intermediary node as many of our competitors do, we are able to offer reliable, real-time charging in prepaid with no revenue leakage. Why is this important? Competing systems are forced to check how much is left in a subscriber’s wallet at a certain time interval (often 15 minutes), while we do so in real-time. In a high-cost, high speed, high-data example, if I only had $1 left in my pre-paid wallet, but was roaming on an LTE network and watching Netflix, a network using Sandvine would be able to stop my data usage as soon as I ran out of credit, while a competing solution that uses a time interval could overshoot by multiple gigabytes, resulting in the operator having to absorb those costs.
   
• Our policy language SandScript - Much more than the typical rules-based systems that severely restrict the user and cannot execute orthogonal policy conditions, SandScript allows freeform policy expression to link any condition to any action. Whether via our ServiceDesigner GUI or via a command line interface, it allows operators to quickly define new and innovative service plans without the need for expensive and time-consuming custom code to be written by a third party integrator. We purpose built our products from scratch around service creation, which is what lead to the creation of SandScript. Our competitors tried to build service creation into traffic management, which leaves them with clumsy concepts of ‘pipes’ and ‘virtual circuits’.
   
• A good example here would be our work with Vox Telecom. Our products helped them partner with a local retailer, so that when consumers purchased a video game in a retail store, the received a free trial of their new gaming tier.

• Our proud history of innovation – Over the past 10 years, we’ve helped make over 200 network more intelligent, and over 80 of them through our Usage Management product specifically. Our people take the knowledge gained from all of those deployments and it not only guides the products we make, but also makes us a valuable consulting sales resource to our customers. In 2011, we were the first to bring application based service plans to market for Telefonica’s Movistar [here] properties, and those plans are still cited as the benchmark for innovation, by industry analysts and even our competitors (See pg. 12 of Allot’s Q2 2012 MobileTrends Charging Report attached below) to this day.