Written by: Andy Johnston, Jan Gabrielsson, Charilaos Christopoulos, Martien Huysmans and Ulf Olsson

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Service delivery platforms (SDP) are operator solutions that provide a unified middle ground for the optimized exchange of services between users, operators, and service and content providers.

The authors describe different perspectives on SDPs and the business and technical influences that drive their evolution. They also introduce common features and technology. Instead of trying to cover every angle, the authors focus on two of an SDP's most important roles: the management and sales of service offerings.

Introduction and perspectives
Technical advances and the alignment of market forces and competitive environments have given service delivery platforms renewed relevance and currency as a middle-ground solution for enabling the optimized exchange of services across different networks and devices and between users, operators, and service and content providers.

Two of an SDP's most important roles are to manage and sell services (Figure 1). They may be used to package network capabilities and services into offerings that operators bundle with attractive discounts and promote in campaigns. They may also be used to track service usage in order to identify opportunities for improvement and additional sales. To succeed in these roles, service delivery platforms support

• store fronts, such as portals, where consumers may discover and consume operator offerings; and
• supply-chain elements, such as partner portals and business-to-business (B2B) gateways, where external content and services can connect to operator business processes and network channels.

Service delivery platforms do not create and deliver services - that is the business of standardized network enablers, devices, and related service-delivery infrastructures for telephony, short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), wireless application protocol (WAP), broadband internet, and emerging IP Multimedia Subsystem-based (IMS) services.

For the SDP manage-and-sell proposition to succeed, operators must ensure effective interplay between business processes and delivery mechanisms. This interplay includes monitoring the performance of the overall service offering and the ability of operators and their partners to quickly create attractive new offerings. To this end, SDPs support strong yet flexible integration with operator systems, such as business support systems (BSS), operations support systems (OSS), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. In practice, however, the border between these systems and SDPs is beginning to blur as the BSS, OSS and CRM systems themselves evolve to support a greater level of real-time interaction with users and partners who demand live access to information and self-service functions.

Ericsson's SDP solution - which consists of service offerings, business solutions, common functions, enablers, and professional services - delivers on the manage-and-sell promise while catering for the delivery of emerging top-line revenue-generating services, such as mobile TV and IPTV. It also includes the enablers and service-creation and execution features that are necessary for delivering true end-to-end solutions.