SDPs and Killer App Cultivation

One of my favorite urban sports legends involves a young baseball scout who’s sent to a remote region of the country to evaluate a pitching prospect rumored to be unhittable. After witnessing what he believes is the second coming of Nolan Ryan, the scout breathlessly reports his findings to the veteran manager.

“This kid is the real thing,” he says. “No one could touch him. The opposing team could only manage a foul ball the entire game. Do you want me to sign him?”

“No,” responds the manager. “Sign up the player who hit the foul ball.”

If you spin this sports parable toward the telecommunications industry, the salient message is that a service provider can rarely predict the emergence of a successful service. The telecommunications scrapheap is piled waste high with would-be killer applications, while the real money makers – such as SMS or ring back tones – took the communications universe largely by surprise.

It is with this sentiment – call it the Foul Ball Rule – in mind that operators should sharpen their search for a modern SDP that will assist them in elevating their position in the value chain beyond the job description of dumb pipe. An SDP, if designed and implemented efficiently, will help operators meet multiple objectives, such as opening up their networks for use by third parties and reducing operating and capital expenses by eliminating functional overlap and introducing reusable components. But the most valuable byproduct of an SDP adoption is the opportunity to create an environment in which unexpected foul balls, some of which may turn out to be grand slams, can flourish.

Since the conception of a killer app is an event that can rarely be predicted and is mostly a product of good fortune, the logical course to take for increasing their frequency of occurrence is to increase the number of services in an operators portfolio. A 20th century services creation and delivery environment was hostile to this sort of approach, as new services, which essentially required a new network, were just too costly to develop and implement to yield more than a few new applications on an annual basis. Fortunately, 21st century services environments, which are based on reusable components and a horizontal architecture, are designed to take the expense and risks out of service creation.

The modern SDP supplies fertile ground for application development in multiple ways. For starters, an SDP enables the creation of new applications through the blending and mixing of components and services that already exist in the network. In many respects, personalization and customization is the killer app of the 21st century. SDPs provide a second source of application adoption by opening up the underlying telecommunications network to third-party service providers and developers. Through application gateways supplied by SDPs, telecom operators can add hundreds or thousands of new applications to their services catalog without assembling a single line of code – or building out an overlay network.

The magic that the SDP brings to the operator has nothing to do with service creation. Instead, a modern day SDP’s ability to automate and simplify the task of integrating third-party services and manage third-party relationships is the secret sauce that will enable operators to claim a position in the services revenue stream beyond dumb pipe. It is only through an SDP’s ability to provide an automated and reusable method for managing thousands of services, partners and even business models that operators will be able to transform their service delivery infrastructures into agile environments that can compete with or add value to the offerings of Internet-based service providers.

Accordingly, the cultivation of a modern SDP is an imperative for telecom operators. Without the capabilities that an SDP brings, operators will neither be able to support a longtail business model or recognize that unexpected foul ball when it comes along.