The service delivery platform (SDP) is no newcomer in telecom; but like the industry itself, it’s a timeworn entity undergoing a rapid and massive transformative shift, led by mobility, IP and third-party applications. And carriers must take an expanded view of their network to keep everyone else from eating their lunch.
Two items on the to-do list loom large for carriers. One, they want to craft a long-tail strategy where they have thousands of apps in their stable of offerings; some of them might be only mildly lucrative, while some are wildly revenue generating. The idea is that cumulatively, one makes money, while serving a range of customer niches. The other separate-yet-related need is the requirement to open up network information to those third parties to use while developing services.
Right now, most operators’ third-party relationships are one-offs, managed manually. “So every time an operator wants to set up a relationship, they have to go through this process,” said Joe McGarvey, principal analyst for IP services infrastructure at Current Analysis, in an interview. McGarvey said. “Ten, 20, even 50 relationships they can manage, but when you get to an Apple App-store kind of environment with potentially hundreds of thousands of third party apps, you need a mechanism to manage that automatically, and that’s what an SDP can offer.”
Meanwhile, an SDP can enable the operator to open the network so that resources and assets can be shared in a uniform, secure and controlled way. “The resources that the operator has, like customer data, location data and last-mile control (especially if they have both fixed and mobile access networks) are of great value,” McGarvey explains. The operator has a potential new biz model or revenue stream in leasing these resources to third-party partners. No one's gotten to the point where they're estimating the percentage, but there are high hopes this will account for a substantial amount of operator revenue going forward.”
All of this means that the SDP now has two primary new functions; exposing those resources, and then creating a way for those to be utilized by third parties, which have relationships with the carrier that are managed in an automated fashion. And because of this, worldwide sales of service delivery platform software and integration services are expected to double between 2008 and 2013, when they will reach $4.09 billion.
These are investments that will certainly be made, McGarvey noted. “If you think of the operator's network, if they're successful in opening it up and making it easy for developers to tap into those resources, they are making it possible for services on the network to run on any device connected to it,” he said. “The network as the phone, that's where they're trying to get to, to make the network easy to write to.”
Theoretically those services will be richer than mobile widgets available at the App Store because they can be contextual, with up-to-date subscriber information. “But it’s not possible to get there without the evolved SDP,” said McGarvey.
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