There was so much hoopla at Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona about the app store concept that even those of us who stayed home still hear it ringing in our heads.
And much like it was at Supercomm a few years back when every speech or spiel mentioned Vonage — which wasn’t even present — so much of the discussion at MWC centered on Apple, its iPhone and its app store, that it is reasonable to believe the term is a derivative of the company’s name. It isn’t. The app in app store is short for application and everyone in telecom is trying to figure out how to deliver more of them faster, easier, inexpensively and profitably.
But there is no app store a service provider can go buy or license. So it would stand to reason that the service delivery platform is the next best option. Unfortunately, it’s not as if a service provider can go out and buy or license an SDP either. In fact, industry bodies and some vendors are still trying to determine exactly what a service delivery platform is. Others feel they have the answer and are simply trying to find the best way to position it.
When a research firm such as Infonetics Research sites numbers on the service delivery market such as this — the service delivery platform and integration services market grew by 53 percent in 2007 and will top $3.5 billion by 2011 — it takes into account not only pre-sales and integration services, but all the various piece parts that comprise an SDP. These parts aren’t always from the same vendor. Nor are they from the same integrator. The SDP sale is necessarily collaborative.
However, some pretty big players disagree on how the sale should be led. Surely an SDP sale is complex, but is it so complex it must be a service-led engagement or are solutions mature enough to allow for a product-led sale?
“The industry once had a grand unified vision with big software, but now what we have are a bunch of platforms that need to inter-work,” said Dan Geiger, directing analyst for next generation OSS and policy at Infonetics.
While the biggest market opportunity currently for service delivery software and services is in Europe, Geiger said North America will grow to about a 25 percent market share on the backs of the AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS initiatives.
Oracle is the leader in the worldwide SDP software market and is confident in its product-led approach. “The SDP decision is made on product. The services come in for the implementation,” said Ty Wang, director of product management at Oracle. “So we have a product-based approach. We don’t go in and say ‘let us create a custom solution for you.’”
