Matching Apple’s App Store and Going One Better

Like Oracle, HP believes an increasingly important part of the next generation SDP, will be the revenue management component. And when you combine the application development component, the revenue management and charging components and tie them into systems that provide the business intelligence about subscribers, you get close to the kind of SDP envisioned and called by HP the Semantic SDP and by Oracle simply the next gen SDP.

Not a term Oracle admits to being familiar with, the Semantic SDP as Dragunas sees it goes one step further. It integrates network services, Web services and user context and used contextual communications services information to describe it. It then requires a service intelligence engine to manage contextual relationships and exploit the rich customer history to determine what offer to make or service to present to a customer — in real time.

“The big play for service providers is to provide improved experiences around how users actually use services and leverage the user profile to drive personalization,” Dragunas said.

This kind of capability is not just a nice differentiator; it may be a survival mechanism for service providers. Wang said that while at MWC, he heard a lot of grumbling, questioning if it was too late for service providers to match the service delivery models of Internet companies such as Google or Apple with its app store. He said developers for companies such as Apple have already figured out ways to get around the need to access certain information once thought the sole domain of service providers, such as location and billing. Service providers have one more arrow in their collective quiver. It comes in the form of subscriber profiles and usage data. They must exploit this unique advantage before it too disappears.

Whether it is services-led or product-led, whether it’s semantic or next gen, if you add the right Web interfaces and load up the product and service catalogs to these SDPs, you have yourself an app store to rival all app stores.

The iPhone App Store as of mid-March was on pace to reach $1 billion in sales in its first year, according to Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf, who said the number of applications on the App Store recently surpassed 25,000 and downloads exceeding 500 million.

These kinds of numbers have companies like Amdocs, BlackBerry (App World), IBM, Microsoft (Windows Marketplace for Mobile), Nokia (Ovi), Telstra and many more jumping on the app store bandwagon.

If service providers can add that semantic twist to the app store, they just might not lose by being late to the game.