The service delivery platform conundrum

There is nothing more important to today’s telecom service providers than finding ways to more quickly deliver new, competitive services in a cost-effective, user-friendly fashion. Yet nothing has weathered more bad news and disparagement than the efforts to create service delivery platforms.

A mixed bag of results arrives this week. On the one hand, Microsoft finally has admitted what the industry has come to know, which is that its effort to create a telco 2.0 software platform, the Connected Services Framework (CSF), isn’t working as hoped or expected. The software giant started out by proposing an open framework, enabling applications developers to add functionality and create services along with service providers themselves. Earlier this year, Microsoft refocused its efforts and planned to work more closely with its service provider customers to make CSF work as an SDP. But in November, Microsoft informed its customers that CSF as a product is at the end of its life and further development work would be left to the systems integrators that signed on as partners.

The challenge Microsoft faced is the same one that those backing IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) ultimately face: While everyone in telecom talks about standards, modular elements that are reusable and open applications environments, the reality is that every service provider has a somewhat unique network, and there are a lot of reasons — and vested interests — behind preserving some of that uniqueness. As a result, open platform efforts are uphill battles at best. As Terry McGuigan, director of global partners for Microsoft’s communications sector, said, “The degree of customization required has caused us to rethink whether we could use a standard platform.”

The other news this week is a bit more positive: The NGN IMS Forum’s IMS Report Card concluded, in a more than slightly defensive way, that IMS is proving technically capable, and given the need for service providers to move away from proprietary “one-off” means of delivering service, IMS is well-positioned for deployment, even if it initially is done in piecemeal or “bolt-on” fashion. The Forum said there is need for continued work in key areas — namely security, billing and roaming — and promises to tackle that work and to address interoperability with back-office systems.

On its way to those conclusions, the Forum took the unusual step of quoting disparaging comments from a wide range of trade press articles and analyst reports (Telephony included) and then disputing them point-by-point. I think in this way the organization may be unintentionally giving more voice to IMS critics than needed, especially when most of the comments are from 2007 or earlier. The Telephony citation was from 2005, when IMS was certainly not what it is today.

I think the realistic view is that IMS is inevitable, and what the industry needs to do now is get out of its own way in making this happen sooner rather than later. This means acknowledging that telecom service providers need to accept more commonality — it sure seems to be working for U.S. cable operators — and vendors need to view hero efforts like Microsoft’s CSF as admirable but not workable in today’s environment.