Telecom Lead America: The subscriber data management
(SDM) market, including SDM software and services for mobile and fixed line
networks, touched $570 million in 2011, up 57 percent from 2010.
Traditional SDM vendors are facing competition from IT
players like Oracle and Amdocs, who are looking to leverage their master data
management (MDM) capabilities.
Operators in the EMEA region will lead the SDM
opportunity. Mobile operators in Western Europe, particularly Vodafone, Orange,
and Telecom Italia, are among the first to deploy SDM.
Subscriber growth remains a key driver in the Asia Pacific
market, where mobile operators like Bharti and NTT DoCoMo have used SDM
software to help manage subscriber growth, simplify new subscriber
provisioning, reduce SIM card fraud, and manage subscribers with multiple SIM
cards.
SDM investments are being driven by network modernization
initiatives, particularly 4G LTE deployments, in turn driving operator interest
in the separation of back-end SDM databases from front-end applications to
consolidate subscriber data.
SDM will play a key role in operators’ offload strategies
by supporting subscriber preferences and entitlements regardless of which
network is actually carrying the subscriber’s traffic.
As SDM strategies evolve and mature, operators are
increasingly viewing subscriber data as a way to differentiate themselves from
Web providers and other players, particularly in the app store space, where
subscriber data may just be the killer API,” said Shira Levine, directing
analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research.
Though there has been considerable interest among
operators over the last year in making network assets like location, presence,
and messaging available to third party developers for the creation of new
services, operators are recognizing that their most valuable asset may well be
their subscriber data, including network and IT data specific to them,” Levine
added.
The SDM software and services market is expected to grow
to $1.86 billion by 2016. The significant growth will be driven by network
modernization initiatives, particularly LTE deployments. LTE roll outs are
prompting mobile operator interest in the separation of back-end SDM databases
from front-end applications to consolidate subscriber data.
