While capital expenditure budgets may be getting trimmed for 2009, service providers indicate spending on subscriber data management solutions will increase, according to Infonetics Research.
The market finished 2008 at around $128 million, up 21 percent from 2007. Based on feedback from service providers, Infonetics has raised its 2009 forecast, almost doubling it from its previous report.
Jeff Heynen, directing analyst at Infonetics Research and lead analyst at the time the latest report was completed, said that although the global economic turmoil has operators lowering their capital expenditure budgets for 2009 and the initial part of 2010, discussions with operators and subscriber data management vendors indicate spending on SDM solutions will actually increase, as SDM software is viewed as solving multiple pressing issues, including preventing dirty or duplicate data, reducing revenue leakage due to fraud, reducing operational costs, and speeding time to market for new services.
“All of these issues are critical as operators seek to improve their bottom lines when top-line growth is hard to come by,” he said.
Dan Geiger, Infonetics’ new directing analyst for next generation OSS and policy, said customers want their services to be personalized and delivered in a timely fashion, so service providers are embracing technologies that provide rapid and specific subscriber insight. “Subscriber data management software helps provide this insight and solves some longstanding operational inefficiency to boot,” he said.
SDM software will account for most of the forecasted revenue, but Geiger said integration services are growing even faster than software.
Several technical and interoperability issues in this sector still need work, such as interoperability challenges posed by federating data from multiple data stores. However, Geiger believes many service providers will purchase SDM software along with off-the-shelf servers and integrate the software themselves. Some mobile operators are using SDM solutions to extend the life of their existing home location registries while some believe and that next-generation HLR platforms will be used to deliver fixed-mobile convergence services at a lower overall cost.
But the big driver is personalization. “Everyone is talking about personalization and being subscriber centric,” Geiger said. “For that you need good subscriber data management. And we are seeing new companies such as Redknee and Xeround address the problem of distributed data with virtual databases.”
The EMEA region is expected to account for 46 percent of total worldwide SDM market, while Central and Latin America become the fastest growing regional markets for SDM software and integration services.
