Mashery, Layer 7 and Apigee emerge on SDP software market

Telecom Lead India: Mashery, Layer 7, and Apigee are emerging on the global Service Delivery Platform (SDP) software and services market.

The SDP software and services market grew 14 percent to $3.6 billion in 2012.

SDP services are expected to make up 75 percent of the SDP market by 2017.

“The SDP opportunity is alive and well, but looks very different than it did even a few years ago,” said Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics Research.

Mobile deployments are the primary driver behind SDP growth, representing the bulk of SDP revenue.

Recently, Heavy Reading said SDP products are adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts and Web services interfaces to become more plug and play, with service orchestration coming to the fore as a key technology for aggregating and coordinating components within the SDP itself, as well as all the application-level services that sit on top.

The next round of SDP implementations is likely to be heavily influenced by another next-gen hot button – IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) – with legacy and IMS service convergence a top concern as suppliers reengineer their products.

Infonetics says established SDP vendors — Oracle, Huawei, Ericsson, etc — will partner with or acquire new and emerging suppliers such as Mashery, Layer 7, and Apigee.

Heavy Reading earlier suggested that the SDP market is becoming divided into two groups: vendors (often small startups) selling point solutions, and SDP “framework” providers – the systems integrators and network equipment suppliers that pull different components together to build carrier-grade environments that encompass the range of functions an operator needs in an SDP.

Meanwhile, Oracle leads the SDP software segment in 2012, followed closely by Huawei.

On the services side, Ericsson pulled ahead of Huawei for 1st place, according to Infonetics.

The global SDP market will reach $5.9 billion in 2017, with the strongest growth coming from developing regions in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, where operators are looking to counteract low ARPU by offering differentiated services

Very few operators are investing in soup-to-nuts service delivery platforms anymore. Instead, they’re implementing discrete components of the SDP (like network exposure and web service environments) that allow them to deliver new services while reducing operational costs.

This trend will continue as operators expand beyond the consumer market and begin capitalizing on the growing enterprise opportunity, including helping businesses support their B-to-C strategies and insert themselves into the machine-to-machine (M2M) space.

The SDP sector still has some significant challenges to overcome. Carriers appear to be buying into the general concepts embodied by SDP, but they are still unclear on how those concepts translate into real-world deployments.

For their part, SDP vendors are not bringing a great deal of clarity to the SDP picture – there’s no consensus on a standard model for SDP, and vendor efforts to portray SDP as an integral match with IMS are only adding to the confusion.
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