H3G Italy is part of one of the world's largest operators and has over 2.6 million subscribers in Italy. Ericsson will provide managed services to increase efficiency and reduce costs by optimizing the use of assets and managing the operator's advanced 3G multimedia service environment – including management of the service layer and business support systems such as billing.

The Service Delivery Platform is what lies behind a cost-efficient way of managing and launching new services, content and applications within the 2.5G and 3G networks. It is the efficient machinery that enables launches to be fast, but also most importantly, right.

 

Marcus Lannerbro, Strategic Marketing Manager for Service Layer at Ericsson, says that the platform gives operators more flexibility to launch new services on the market. "Consumers expect services that are adapted to their specific needs," he says. "If their needs change they want the service to do so as well. Also, if a service is not used anymore, operators need to be aware of this and be able to replace it with new services to keep their customers."

 

Until now, consumer services are often vertically designed, which means that new support functions and enablers are needed for every new service. Currently, a huge number of services need to be launched to the consumers, in order to fulfill each individual, unique, need. This makes it impossible to continue with the vertical approach. The way forward is a horizontal design of the Service Delivery Platform with common support functions, common enablers, and a service creation environment that supports the development community – both internal and third party content and application developers.

 

"The horizontal design makes it possible to reuse network functionality in every single consumer service," Lannerbro says. "This means great cost efficiency and reduced time to launch new services. We have the complete offering to provide the efficient Service Delivery Platform, either integrated into the operator network or hosted in one of our hosting centers."

 

Two operators that recently have realized the benefits of an efficient Service Delivery Platform from Ericsson are Taiwanese TCC and Australian Telstra. Both companies have signed a system integration and service delivery solution deal with Ericsson, where Ericsson provides and integrates the complete service delivery solution based on the Ericsson Service Delivery Platform.

 

David Clark, CTO of TCC, says that Ericsson is an invaluable partner for their upcoming 3G services. "Ericsson has the systems integration expertise, as well as the service delivery platform required to support us deliver seamless value-added service to a large number of our customer," he says.

 

For Telstra, the deal was the first of its kind in Australia. Holly Kramer, director of Wireless and Mobility Products at Telstra, says Ericsson was chosen as a partner because it understands Telstra's business drivers, their customers in the Australian market – plus an ability to bring knowledge from other operators around the world.

 

The Service Delivery Platform consists of a service creation environment: common support functions for authentication, authorization and session management and common application enablers. It is built using Ericsson's standards-based framework and opens up the network securely, and controlled. The platform also provides high-level interface like Web Services and Parlay to reduce the complexity of application development and deployment.

 

Read more on the Ericsson Service Delivery Platform here. http://www.ericsson.com/products/hp/Ericsson_Service Delivery_Platform_bs.shtml