This week marked a big event for SEVEN Networks as we extended our Open Channel® offering from a single product that addresses mobile app signalling to an entire software product line delivering end-to-end visibility, management, and optimization of wireless traffic.

Here are the new software products added to the Open Channel product family (read the press release to get more detail on each of these):

• Open Channel Policy Enforcement – Enforces policies to manage mobile traffic and enable service plan creation.
• Open Channel Seamless Mobility – Delivers seamless mobility when devices move between carrier networks and Wi-Fi.
• Open Channel Wi-Fi QoE – Optimizes Wi-Fi offloading decisions to improve end-user experience.

To support this announcement, we’ve been on a media tour, talking with leading wireless industry journalists and analysts and getting them excited about what the new Open Channel software products can do.

Our core message is that carriers need to regain control over mobile app data traffic and need a solution that does a better job of optimizing and managing this traffic. This is one statement on which we had universal agreement.

What caught the attention of the analysts and media was that Open Channel’s client/server architecture extends control to the mobile device itself so that traffic can be managed before impacting the network. This conserves network resources much more effectively than solutions that work only from the network side.

Another point of discussion was the ability of Open Channel Policy Enforcement to open up new service plan options, such as an email-only data plan. The software is context-aware, detecting many device states such as idle time, active use status, radio connected state or time of day.  These context-aware capabilities provide great flexibility to carriers in defining and enforcing policies.

A couple of other significant elements of the new Open Channel are the two software components that help make real the promise of using Wi-Fi to offload data traffic. This is something carriers strongly desire, but enabling it without impacting the customer is tricky.  For example, a customer watching a streaming video while transitioning from a cell network to Wi-Fi will lose that stream and have to reconnect to the server to restart the video.

The Open Channel Seamless Mobility product ensures continuous service delivery for mobile apps during these transitions for a high quality end-user experience.  The Open Channel Wi-Fi QoE (Quality of Experience) product optimizes decisions about when and where to offload, taking into consideration network quality factors before switching from cellular to Wi-Fi.

We concluded our meetings by emphasizing that these Open Channel software products are designed to help carriers take back control of app data traffic while improving the customer experience for subscribers. The response to the new Open Channel products, and the product line as a whole, was very positive and we will share more details about the product in future blog posts.