Can Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) Cut Prices, Revolutionize MSP Services?

While there are thousands of telephony-based MSP services available, there could be more and prices could be far lower if Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) take hold.

And if research by MarketsandMarkets is to be believed, SDN is indeed already taking off, poised to hit near $7 billion in revenue in 2018. Between now and then average growth will be just a bit over nine percent, that according to "Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) Market: Global Worldwide Trends, Adoption and Market Forecasts (2013 - 2018)."

SDP is somewhat akin to Platform- as- a -Service (PaaS). PaaS is a full software development environment in the cloud. This way programmers don’t have to worry about managing their software and hardware infrastructure – they can just develop software. Some PaaS offerings include building blocks that speed development, as many functions are already written for you. SDP is much like this form of PaaS, and is aimed at automating the development and deployment of managed services.

SDP’s include main service components, items that make it easy to define and then go ahead and develop the service, and a complete environment that handles all the network integration chores.

“The telecom industry has always been looking for an open framework that will enable them to build and modify services rapidly and in a flexible way. SDP came into existence by the early years of the previous decade. During those years, SDP was in the stage of conceptualization. So telecom operators had very little understanding about the capabilities and potential benefits of SDP. Now, it has been close to eight years, and SDP has matured to a platform with many ready-to-deploy frameworks, as per the requirement,” the research company argued.

The report also indicated that SDP has grown into a mature, beneficial service. “Today, it has reached a level that telecom operators can implement SDP in their network whenever they want. Service delivery platforms assist telecom operators and service providers, in cutting down the Capital expenditure (CAPEX) and Operating expenditure (OPEX (News - Alert)) required for developing, controlling, maintaining and selling new service offerings. Service Delivery Platform also enables the rapid development of service offerings, thereby, greatly reducing the time to market for those service offerings.”

If the potential of SDP is realized, more managed services can be developed quickly. This means that services for smaller groups of users, such as narrow verticals, can be profitably developed. And since SDP lowers the cost of development, presumably services could become cheaper.

Vendors in the SDP market include Alcatel, Ericsson (News - Alert), HP, Lucent, and Oracle.