Seven category defining software players collaborate to ‘productise’ the SDP
A new alliance of software vendors will be on show at 3GSM World Congress. The SDP Alliance incorporates seven companies – each of which delivers a key component of a pre-integrated, convergent, service delivery platform (SDP) to mobile and fixed line operators. Member companies are Aepona, Changingworlds, Cibenix, MobileAware, Mobile Cohesion, OpenNet and Xiam.
According to the Co-Chairman of the Alliance’s Steering Committee, Denis Murphy (who is also Chairman of Alliance member Mobile Cohesion), “The model for implementing service delivery platforms has dramatically shifted. With the emergence of a group of mature, standards-based, software products operators no longer face the time-to-market, cost or
risk associated with entirely custom built solutions. Today system integrators can create tailored solutions based on a set of proven software products. From the operators’ perspective this means faster, cheaper and lower risk projects.”
Colm Healy, CEO of member firm Xiam, endorsed this view, “This Alliance brings together the most important elements of a SDP and offers them either as a unified whole or in a subset of best of breed products. In the past our members have worked together on an ad hoc basis on certain implementations – but now we have a more formalised and unified go-to-market, technical integration and support strategy that deliver massive benefits for target customers. Operators simply want to be able to roll out revenue generating services faster and more efficiently capitalize on their underlying assets. The last thing they want is a massive services engagement to achieve things that should be done pretty much out of the box. And, remember, we’re talking about proven, implemented and integrated solutions that have come together under one roof.”
He continued, “There are also some technical developments that have taken place over the last few years that have helped our member firms. We’re all committed to standard open interfaces based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services standards. However, the end game for the customer is lower risk, lower lifetime total cost of ownership and service deployment costs, and a more rapid return on investment.”