SDPs: The Conduit for Cranking Out Customer-Centric Products and Services

By Angelo Morelli

The communications industry has come a long way since 1876 when the famous words “Mr. Watson come here, I want to see you," were spoken. Back then, no one could have predicted Alexander Graham Bell’s far-fetched contraption would set us on a profound path of change that would one day evolve into a converged product and services environment across mobile devices, computers and televisions.

Fast-forward to today’s lightning-fast Internet environment. Customers are now clamoring for a seamless transition across all the connected devices ushering in utterly new ways for companies to reach these customers.  Multiple devices and applications have emerged that are based on a range of new technologies, from Web 2.0 applications to IP video-on-demand and user generated content. However, to deliver a more robust user experience depends directly on a service delivery platform (SDP) that can manage the complex connected environment.

While there is no standard industry definition for the term, SDP generally refers to the technology building blocks of a multi-service business architecture that is implemented to drive faster speeds to market for new products and services. It provides a common set of functions and a common way of viewing the underlying network.

The stakes are high and the nature of competition is changing. New players from a wider swath of sectors beyond the communications, media entertainment industries are crossing markets traditionally dominated by communications players. This is spurring telcos to re-examine their business models to adapt to the ever-changing technology and consumer environments.

Collaboration and open innovations are also a must in the marketplace of content creation and service delivery. The need to collaborate with an ever-widening set of partners to launch innovative services quickly and deliver them seamlessly across all their customers’ devices is critical to competing in the broader cut-throat convergent ecosystem.

The great enabler to offering this kind of open collaboration smoothly and cost-efficiently is contingent upon an SDP. Large and small companies alike around the world must have an SDP that enables this open collaboration for more agile service creation. To demonstrate how an SDP can act as a powerful enabler, it’s worth spotlighting the dramatic improvements two major European mobile communications providers realized from an SDP upgrade.

Launching new services quickly is particularly critical in fast-growing emerging markets where communications and technology companies have faced increasingly tough competition for customers. This is a common conundrum in the wireless market, and companies must figure out how to survive and thrive. For example, one company in Turkey wanted to deliver new customer value-added offerings such as music downloads, data services and transfers of digital photography. To do so, it needed to improve its SDP architecture – a massive technical and operational challenge. The sheer scale of the company’s operations meant that hundreds of services would have to be cohesively migrated to the new SDP without interrupting the user experience.

Also, as the one of the first SDP deployments in the Turkish wireless marketplace, this project was high profile and closely watched, with impressive results. The new SDP enabled the company to simplify relationships with third-party service developers, cut time-to-market for their new services, and orchestrate these new services across multiple platforms to provide an uninterrupted user experience.

Another major European telecommunications service provider deployed a SDP solution to launch a new multi-screen video service across multiple devices. The SDP was the crucial component making it possible to integrate customer profiles and information coming from different sources and to deliver a unified range of services across several devices. The new service went live in record time – less than four months after kickoff and was powered by the flexibility of an SDP.

To drive revenue growth and improve customer retention hinges on creating cutting-edge services that can easily flow across the “three screens" – mobile devices, computers and televisions. With increasingly shorter development lifecycles combined with smaller budgets, companies must find new ways to mitigate risk while meeting this customer demand. An SDP is the critical underlining enabler that effectively allows companies to not only work faster, but also work smarter in the age of convergence.

Angelo Morelli is an executive director with Accenture , responsible for Accenture's offerings and work around new product development and innovation for communications, high tech and media clients globally.  He is based in Rome.