Market Trends: Next-Generation Service Delivery Platforms

According to Gartner report.(Sep. 2010)

The pre-eminent focus of communications service providers' (CSPs') investments in the operational domain points to solutions that endorse new revenue generation and improved user experience. In conjunction with this new customer-centric view, application development and legacy interoperability drive strong investments in next-generation (NG) service delivery platforms (SDPs). This also leads to the acceleration of network and service exposure, as well as amplified partnerships with the ecosystem of third-party developers and content and application providers and NG intelligent network (IN) integration.

This reports discusses prevailing trends in the worldwide market from a demand and supply side and briefly portrays the capabilities of leading vendors in the worldwide NG SDP market. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with vendors and CSPs, as well as market share and forecast assumption research, such as "Forecast Analysis: Telecom Operations Management Systems (BSS, OSS and SDP), Worldwide, 2006-2014, 2Q10 Update." This report offers guidance to CSPs' network and IT managers with respect to strategic NG SDP vendor sourcing decisions. It also helps vendors' product management, R&D, marketing and business strategist executives to reassess their position in the market.
 

Key Findings

• NG SDPs are not implemented as a "big bang," end-to-end approach across network, service and application layer, as initially anticipated. Instead, implementations reside in discrete areas following an incremental migration evolution. The capability to leverage legacy assets, such as INs, remains a prevailing feature.
• NG SDPs tend to become a motor for innovative services and, therefore, revenue generation. Application creation and integration capabilities, for example, concerning application storefronts, as well as digital commerce and operations support systems (OSSs)/business support systems (BSSs), become differentiating factors.
• In this context, CSPs' focus will gradually shift to IT-related issues, such as Web 2.0, mashups,service exposure and network enablers. In the longer term, it is vital to have skills on both the traditional telco networking and IT front.
   

Recommendations

CSPs:

• Invest swiftly in a more agile creation and delivery environment for innovative services to be able to anticipate new value chains and sources of revenue. If you wait too long, you will fail to attract new subscribers and maintain profitability during the next five years.
• Transform silo-based service infrastructures into an open, standards-based, NG SDP architecture, which still allows reuse of legacy service components.
• Center your immediate efforts on pragmatic enhancements to existing telco services to leverage legacy assets in new composite services. In the medium to long term, however, IT matters such as Web 2.0, service exposure and device enablers, application stores, as well as improvements to the user experience, will be imperative.
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) business models might help to mitigate risks, control costs and yet join a complete ecosystem of back-end, client and developer communities.

NG SDP vendors:

• For long-term success, take a preintegrated approach to NG SDPs, OSSs, BSSs, subscriber data management and end-user devices, content management and network integration.
• Offer strong consulting, business and system process management, implementation and support services, if necessary in partnership with integrators. System integrators (SIs) should partner with network equipment providers (NEPs) to address network-related requirements.
• Improve your solutions' integration with those of third parties, and with network enablers and Web 2.0 services. In the long term, you need to plan for cloud-based SDP offerings, as well as for hosted NG SDP delivery options.
• In the longer term, you might consider branching your NG SDP offerings into other verticals, such as energy, utilities or city authorities/public sectors, which face similar challenges to telcos.