Mutual Assured Profitability

Back in the good old days, when wars were served cold and Wall Street wasn’t looking for handouts, political theorists used to wax poetic about Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD was the cheery notion that a president need not worry about that 3 a.m. call because of a general understanding between Moscow and Washington that a nuclear attack from one side would be answered in kind by the other. Despite all the fist waving and shoe pounding that characterized American-Soviet relations during most of the second half of the 20^th century, MAD served as sort of an absurd bond between two global enemies, lifting both nations from time to time from the brink of nuclear annihilation.

If the yankees and commies had MAD to pull them through the Cold War, operators and equipment makers can look toward MAP – Mutual Assured Profitability – to get around the current impasse over the adoption of new services infrastructure architectures, namely IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Service Delivery Platform (SDP).

IMS and SDP are the keys to the Promised Land – a magical place where margins are substantial and customers never switch allegiances – for both operators and their equipment suppliers. While operators and equipment suppliers will most likely be able to eke out a sustainable business if IMS and SDP don’t gain traction, mass adoption of these architectures is essential to secure strong finance futures for operators and vendors alike.

For the operator, the adoption of an open and horizontally-oriented service delivery environment with reusable parts is the only way a carrier can transcend its dumb-pipe aura and evolve into a value-added service provider, enabling it to fend off challenges from Over the Top service providers, such as Google and Yahoo!. Only through the adoption of a streamlined service delivery infrastructure, enabled by IMS and SDP, will operators be able to leverage their natural assets – local pipes and subscriber data – to add value to any service traversing its network and grab a share of revenue from high-end premium services. While operators that miss out on evolving their networks may not be on the eve of destruction – as some will figure out how to continue to survive by selling transport services alone – dreams of dominance will dissipate faster than a mushroom cloud.