It took a long time for the industry to decide what a service delivery platform should be. The one thing everyone finally agreed on is that it should do much more than deliver. With that in mind, Infonetics Research has increased its forecast.
Shira Levine, directing analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics, said in her recent report that the service delivery platform has traditionally been seen as a tool to deliver services to the end user, but that she sees a growing interest in the concept of the two-sided business model, in which operators generate additional revenue from developers by providing access to network capabilities and subscriber information.
“This trend is driving investment in solutions that not only allow operators to expose assets like call control, location, and messaging to third-party developers to create a more dynamic content ecosystem, but also allow them to bill for that exposure,” she said.
As a result, Infonetics now projects the worldwide service delivery platform (SDP) services and software market will hit $4.7 billion in 2014. The biggest player in SDP software and services is Huwaei.
Individually, Oracle leads the SDP software market and Ericsson leads the SDP services market. Growth is geographic, with the most pronounced growth opportunities coming from the developing regions of Asia Pacific, Central and Latin America (CALA), and the Middle East.
Momentum can be credited in part to initiatives such as GSMA’s OneAPI commercial pilot and the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC,) which are working to create a developer-friendly service creation environment and standards-based platforms for operators to leverage when building their mobile storefronts.
The report tracks revenue separately for consulting, integration and hosted SDP services, and for the five main SDP software components: network and subscriber abstraction, SDP framework, service creation environment, service orchestration, and Web services environment.
It also tracks performance and market share of vendors such as Accenture, Aepona, Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, Argela, Atos, CapGemini, Datatronics, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, Motorola, Nokia Siemens, Oracle, Tata, TechMahindra, Telcordia, Telenity, TietoEnator, Volantis and ZTE.
