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. In fact, the SDP is emerging as a linchpin for keeping everyone else from eating their lunch, as operators transition to becoming value-added service providers.
“What's driving this is the need for operators to make a transition and transform their networks to get to the point of offering the network as a service, inserting themselves into the revenue streams of their partners and sometimes competitors,” Joe McGarvey, principal analyst for IP services infrastructure at Current Analysis, told B/OSS. “They want to block the threat posed by the over-the-top folks, with services and third-party ecosystems of their own. An SDP in essence delivers the capabilities that enable the operator to make this transformation.”
An Immediate Need
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,” 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.”
