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BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© 2012 Frost & Sullivan 1 "50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership"

2013

2012 Global Customer Value Enhancement Award in Customer Experience Management (CEM)

2012 Global Customer Value Enhancement Award in Customer Experience Management (CEM)

2012



2012 Global Customer Value Enhancement Award in Customer Experience Management (CEM) Frost & Sullivan’s Global Research Platform Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year in business with a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and

consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The company’s research

philosophy originates with the CEO’s 360-Degree Perspective™, which serves as the foundation of its

TEAM Research™ methodology. This unique approach enables us to determine how best-in-class

companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership. Based on the findings of this Best

Practices research, Frost & Sullivan is proud to present the 2012 Global Customer Value

Enhancement Award in Customer Experience Management (CEM) to Polystar.

Significance of the Customer Value Enhancement Award

Key Industry Challenges Addressed by Enhancing Customer Value

Consumers’ desire to do everything on-the-go drives the demand for effective customer experience

management and real-time monitoring tools. Understanding the impact of mobility needs due to the

proliferation of broadband data, ubiquitous service delivery needs (any device, anywhere, anytime), and

the investment in new high-capacity radio frequency (RF) access technology, such as long-term evolution

(LTE), Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and LTE advanced (LTE-A) continue creating demand for customer

experience monitoring solutions.

Mobile users are always connected and are moving across different networks. They are using various

applications, and when moving to the 3G/4G network, they expect applications to work seamlessly. That

means CSPs need to manage quality while continuously monitoring performance of multiple networks. In

addition, the information received from these different networks must be correlated. Providing end

users with meaningful information becomes a challenge as well.

Many OSS solutions are capable of providing a vast amount of information; however, CSPs already have

a great amount of data to deal with, and being able to provide meaningful information in an easily

digestible manner remains a significant challenge for Customer Experience Management (CEM) and

Network Monitoring vendors. CEM vendors provide customer-centric solutions that monitor end user

quality of experience in a meaningful way and help CSPs to succeed in this highly competitive market

place.

Best Practice Award Analysis for Polystar

The Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Enhancement is presented each year to the company

that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its

customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its

services or products. This award recognizes the company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value

that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer

retention and ultimately customer base expansion.



Polystar’s Performance in Customer Experience Management

Polystar, one of the leading providers of Network performance and Business Intelligence solutions,

has been in the front line of providing world-class service assurance and customer experience

monitoring solutions for mobile, fixed and converged networks. Its cutting-edge product portfolio

effectively caters to the needs of the leading telecom network operators, service providers and

network equipment manufacturers. The company's stellar performance is reflected in its consistently

strong growth numbers. Polystar, with the headquarters in Stockholm, has been witnessing healthy

double-digit growth rates from 2010 to 2012 and is ranked as one of the fastest growing companies

with the growth rate of 55 percent in its home country of Sweden. Polystar is expected to continue

growing at accelerated rates from 2012 onwards due to its focus on service assurance and CEM for

the next-generation mobile and fixed networks.

Key Performance Drivers for Polystar

Factor 1: Strong Focus on Service Assurance

Polystar’s strong focus on Real-time Analytics, Service Assurance and CEM solutions has successfully

carved its place among the key CEM vendors. The company’s comprehensive product portfolio

maintains an excellent balance between legacy and next-generation voice and data services that is in

great demand due to today’s hybrid networks. Polystar’s solutions are known for their integrated

real-time data collection capabilities coupled with high-level business intelligence applications.

Polystar has three unique flagship products: the Jupiter visualization application suite and the OSIX

non-intrusive probe system address service and network assurance needs of their customers, while

Solver is a high-performance load, stress and feature test tool for all types of telecommunications

networks.

Telecom operators leverage the Jupiter application suite to gain a holistic view of the different KPIs

related to their customers' experience, which enables them to provide better quality of service to

their subscribers. Various dashboards, Inspector and Event Analyzer applications, which Jupiter

incorporates, provide detailed investigation capability as well as performance and business intelligence-

related data. In addition, the Jupiter solution enables the service providers to segregate their

customers in terms of pattern of data usage. This helps them prioritize customers as per their

respective usage, enabling them to deliver pertinent and quality services.

Jupiter delivers a three-dimensional view of performance data including VIP customer, device and

network information. It grants users access to all possible perspectives, from a helicopter view, giving

the snapshots of the network and service performance all the way down to each individual subscriber

in the network. The seamless drill-down into OSIX enables real-time network monitoring,

troubleshooting and in-depth network investigation. By linking OSIX with Jupiter, Polystar offers an

end-to-end Customer Experience Management solution.

“To add more value to its customers, Polystar entered into partnership with Qosmos to deliver

enhanced customer analytics and in-depth visibility of service quality. Polystar embedded Qosmos

ixEngine into its product portfolio, enabling mobile network operators and service providers to gain



enriched feeds for Big Data analysis on high-speed mobile data, to better understand subscribers’

behaviour and further improve service assurance and customer experience for their clients. By

enhancing its portfolio with mobile aware Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capabilities, Polystar’s

customers benefit from even stronger Big Data analysis to make better sense of the information

goldmine, and, as a result, will be able to successfully monetise their data assets and provide the best

possible subscriber experience.”

Polystar delivers turnkey, end-to-end solutions from data capture to business analytics that gives

immediate value to network operators both on the operation and on the marketing side. Polystar

solutions can also feed other systems and be a source of enriched data for third-party solutions or

homegrown applications. Polystar has the solution already in place that helps CSPs run their operation

better, find new ways to drive revenues and ultimately grow their business.

Factor 2: Strong Focus on LTE Solutions

Polystar was the first company on the market to offer LTE monitoring. In 2010 it has successfully

implemented its LTE solutions to TeliaSonera that deployed the two very first LTE networks in Oslo

and Stockholm and has been sustaining its major competitive advantage in LTE since then. One of

Polystar's key objectives is to consistently offer high-quality products and solutions to its customers. In

an effort to achieve this aim, it closely monitors the market to identify emerging technological needs and

trends in order to offer solutions that effectively address those needs. Likewise, in light of the fact that

various operators are moving towards LTE networks, Polystar has efficiently enhanced all of its solutions

to address the LTE test and monitoring needs. As of today, its OSIX Monitoring system has been

implemented by a number of leading global LTE network operators. By using the time-proven and

evolved LTE monitoring solution, Polystar’s customers benefit from a fast and efficient LTE monitoring

deployments and profit from an aggressive return. OSIX's ability to efficiently monitor different

technologies, ranging from 2G and 3G to 4G or LTE, has generated a clear competitive edge for Polystar

over its competitors in this context.

Factor 3: Advanced Solutions

One of the ways Polystar delivers customer value is by consistently offering high-quality products and

solutions that evolve in tandem with emerging technological needs and trends.

For instance, in September 2012, the company also introduced release 4.7 of its Network Monitoring

solutions and Customer Experience Management. This release demonstrated the company’s continued

focus on LTE coupled with advanced subscriber and mobile data traffic analysis that utilises flexible

dashboards. This release addresses operators’ concerns about the burgeoning foot-print of monitoring

systems and maximises performance, optimises data monitoring and illuminates the need for multiple

additional tools for operators.

In February 2013 Polystar is launching the next generation of its load- and feature-testing tool Solver.

Solver is an advanced tool for load, feature and stress testing that caters to mobile core networks,

primarily through simulation. This solution is capable of simulating all generations of mobile access

networks, session initiation protocol (SIP), as well as fixed networks creating real-life scenarios for

the core network.



The new platform boasts 20 times higher system capacity, enhanced complex functionalities like VoLTE

with SRVCC hand-over, and an unrivalled price–performance ratio on load testing for voice in 2G/3G

and 4G networks. VoLTE is expected to be the leading technology of the 4G networks judging by the

interest coming from the majority of CSPs and NEMs. Solver delivers full wire-speed load on 10 Gb

Ethernet ports with voice traffic that helps communication service providers and network manufactures

to efficiently test voice handling and voice quality in their labs and networks. By adding those features to

the next generation of its Solver product line, Polystar equips its customers with efficient voice testing

capability and ensures 4G voice quality testing. Solver's user-friendly features have delivered consistent

value since 2002 to many global telecom operators and network vendors.

Factor 4: Global Focus

To more effectively reach its ever-expanding international client base, the company has been

continuously strengthening its global presence. Polystar now has over 100 service assurance and

network monitoring customers across 50 countries. Currently, the company has nine offices across

Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific and it continues to increase its global footprint

by adding new offices and working through value-added resellers in order to provide local support. Factor 5: Customer Centricity

Polystar's keen focus on customers' needs has been one of the key factors behind its success. The

company holds several conferences called 'User Meeting' throughout the year to collect valuable

feedback from their customers and discuss product features. Such events witness strong participation

from telecom giants, industry partners and registered customers. These conferences include highly

insightful workshops, discussion and educational presentations by experts.

The learning from such sessions is keenly monitored and incorporated into new products or product

upgrades, with the objective of offering products and solutions that not only meet but rather exceed

customer needs and expectations.

Conclusion

Polystar’s strong focus on service assurance, technology innovation, and state of the art product

portfolio that monitors end-user experience has enabled it to cater to the needs of Communication

Service Providers and Network Equipment Manufacturers on the forefront of the industry. In addition,

its customer-centric business approach has helped Polystar deliver unparalleled value to its global

customer base. For the reasons mentioned above, Polystar is a worthy recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s

2012 Customer Value Enhancement Award in the Customer Experience monitoring market.



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Chart 2: How the CEO's 360-Degree Perspective™ Model Directs Our Research



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