In today’s business environment and economy, it is a rare for a product manufacture to “do it all”. Instead, across many industries are examples where companies focus their investments on differentiation, while outsourcing many important, yet somewhat generic components to trusted suppliers.
One example is building construction. These houses are all highly differentiated properties that appeal to diverse buyers based on their architectural style, price point, location and lifestyle amenities. But one thing they all have in common is similar plumbing technology. The builders of these homes have wisely chosen to focus their resources on their competitive differentiation – whether that’s high-end finishes in a luxury home or a community gym for a downtown apartment building – rather than on the plumbing that buyers don’t often see. Instead, the plumbing subsystems are outsourced to proven and reliable suppliers that are experts in their fields.
Another example is the fiercely competitive world of aviation, where leading airplane manufacturers are also smart about how they spend their R&D resources. In the old days, many plane manufacturers also built their own engines. However today, both Airbus and Boeing have recognized that engines are a complex and specialized component of a commercial aircraft. Rather than investing R&D to develop an engine from scratch, they both leverage engines built by specialists, such as Rolls-Royce. This allows the airplane manufacturers to focus their R&D and engineering teams to focus on other areas where airline manufacturers can and should differentiate.
In a modern IP network with an IMS architecture, the Media Resource Function (MRF) is the plumbing hidden in the walls or the engine under the airplane’s wings. It is a specialized function, with its own unique engineering challenges, that powers today’s next generation networks delivering the real-time media packet processing essential for communication services.
Service providers that deploy an IMS architecture with an MRF engine can offer differentiated services such as VoLTE, VoWiFi, WebRTC and more to attract and retain subscribers. And by standardizing on a OneMRF strategy – one platform for all real-time media processing applications and services – service providers can simplify their network, reduce CapEx and ongoing OpEx, and accelerate new service introduction.
At Radisys, our MediaEngine MRF portfolio, backed by 15+ years of experience and comprehensive and global deployment lifecycle support, is the leading choice for service providers’ MRF deployments. It has been designed from day 1 to be as versatile and flexible as possible for a huge variety of services and architectures. It is of benefit to both application developers and service providers. It provides a number of standards-based control interfaces for broad application server interoperability, delivers the richest audio and video feature set to serve hundreds of media application use cases, and boasts deployments around the world with the leading IMS and WebRTC network infrastructure vendors’ platforms.
Nobody buys a house because it has great plumbing. However, they do expect the plumbing to work – in real time – when they need it. Contact us to learn more about how our market-leading MediaEngine MRF offering can deliver the “plumbing” for your service offerings.
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