Putting Services Behind the Service Delivery Platform

While industry bodies and some vendors still are trying to determine exactly what a service delivery platform is, the market is moving forward — another example of a need that just won’t wait.

The service delivery platform and integration services market grew by 53 percent in 2007, according to a recent forecast by Infonetics Research. And although the rate of increase slowed in 2008 to 28 percent and faces an uncertain year ahead, Infonetics said the market will top $3.5 billion in 2011.

Much of the growth has been driven by the Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa markets. Dan Geiger, directing analyst for next-generation OSS and policy at Infonetics, said the biggest market opportunity currently is in Europe. North America accounted for about 18 percent of the market, but will grow to about a 25 percent market share on the backs of the AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS initiatives.

Although Oracle increased its lead in the worldwide SDP software market with the acquisition of BEA Systems Inc., the overall software and services market for SDPs could get interesting as the leader in worldwide SDP integration services market, Alcatel-Lucent, according to Infonetics, has been given new marching orders by its recently appointed CEO Ben Verwaayen, and they seem to lean toward services. Also, there are other vendors who have committed to the services-led approach and are gaining momentum while others simply drop out, like Microsoft Corp.

Infonetics rightly breaks this market into two parts and calls its report the “Service Delivery Platform Software and Integration Services Report,” because there appears to be two distinct approaches to SDP.

“The industry once had a grand unified vision with big software, but now what we have are a bunch of platforms that need to interwork,” Geiger said.

In the end, that means an SDP solution requires both. The difference is in what a vendor leads with.

“We have always felt that service delivery is more of a services-led engagement than it is product-led,” said Peter Dragunas, director of worldwide network services and platforms in HP’s CME group.

While service providers have expressed their desire to move away from consulting and system integration services because they saw it as an expense, in reality, the inability of vendors to deliver on their plug-and-play promises and the realization that professional services can provide the differentiation service providers need have made them palatable again — and in some cases preferred.

Work being done in the TM Forum on the Service Delivery Framework is no less important in a services-led engagement. The forum’s framework helps define the business and management processes that need to be automated in a service delivery environment. “But when it comes down to it, the SDP has to adapt to the existing environment and every service provider environment is different,” Dragunas said.

HP has specific software solutions for the service delivery environment such as Virtual Identity and Profile Broker, two SOA-based technologies that provide virtualized, single-point access and control to customer information across different silos. The key for services providers being able to differentiate services — the whole point of an SDP — is to personalize those services. And to personalize services, a provider needs that unfettered access to information that exists all over the network. HP feels it is important to start with a design that integrates service delivery solutions, theirs or their partners, into existing environments while building in the flexibility to interwork with new third-party applications.

This eventually will lead to the next generation of SDP, the Semantic SDP that combines the intelligence of the Semantic Web with intelligence about the customer in the service providers’ service delivery environment.

Another increasingly important part of the next-generation SDP, Dragunas said, will be the revenue management component. The company recently came to market with one.

“Today’s services make for a very complex value chain, so we built the ability to define the revenue split upfront so when you create a service, you know how you will deliver the revenue across the whole chain,” Dragunas said.

Geiger said there are two approaches to selling and delivering SDPs, but that it was six of one, half a dozen of the other which one you lead with. “You need them both,” he said.

Time will tell as we move into SDP 3.0.