To sustain growth in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, service providers need more effective service innovation and more rapid service creation. SDP 2.0 capabilities bring providers the opportunity to drive toward high performance by mitigating development and delivery risks, and speeding new services to market, while simultaneously lowering costs and optimising limited resources, says Angelo Morelli.

The communications, high tech and media industries are facing unprecedented change, as the traditional dividing-lines between their marketplaces blur and disappear. As the IP ecosystem converges in the service space, new competitors are emerging in the form of companies with strong brands and a loyal customer base. The resulting ‘hypercompetition’ is putting all participants under enormous pressure to set a path toward high performance based on a transformed ability to innovate and roll out profitable services as quickly as possible.

Over the past five years, the concept of the service delivery platform (SDP) has emerged as a vital strategic element for service providers seeking to drive new products and services to market more quickly. An SDP is a standardised service creation and execution architecture that enables operators to accelerate the introduction of market-driven mobile applications. It does this by providing a common set of functions and a common way of viewing the underlying network.

During the more than eight years that Accenture has been implementing its Service Delivery Platform Solution for service providers, we have seen how an end-to-end solution, from asset design and development through to business integration and control, can help operators reduce service creation costs, accelerate development, promote service reuse, and reduce risk across the application portfolio. However, we believe that companies expecting to achieve and sustain high performance must now make the leap to the next generation—SDP 2.0.

Complexity
For several reasons, the service creation and delivery environment has outpaced many traditional SDPs. One reason is the entry of new competitors such as Google, Apple and Yahoo into market spaces traditionally dominated by telcos. Another is the growing need to partner with other companies to create compelling innovations. A third is the need for providers to create consumer services that leverage ‘Web 2.0.’ capabilities.

As today's Internet environment intersects with wireless and broadband, it is creating a wave of services that treat the consumer as part of a larger social fabric. These social networks influence customers’ buying behaviour. Companies that understand these impacts, and harness them with innovative services that flow seamlessly across the ‘three screens’ of the mobile device, computer and television, can drive higher revenues and improved customer loyalty.

Given these imperatives, Accenture's vision for ’SDP 2.0’ enables faster, more cost-effective and lower-risk service development in a converged environment. This requires bringing together four key functional groupings:

Access − the SDP entrance point. The applications in this layer manage and control the SDP capabilities from a user interface viewpoint.

Enablers − providing a set of building blocks common to all services.

Services − composite services consisting of functionality from several different enablers within a service oriented architecture (SOA).

Core − centralised business support with integrated process flows and logic.

The Accenture SDP 2.0 framework
Developed with these groupings in mind, Accenture's SDP 2.0 framework is designed to optimise IP-based service development across multiple activities and technologies. It has of five key layers:

-Convergent, innovative three-screen offers—triple or quadruple plays. Crucially, SDP 2.0 aims to capture the consumer’s "first screen" to become the primary conduit in a wireless broadband, all-IP world.

-Device platforms—The next layer contains the operating system, enabling middleware, and embedded applications for creating a compelling multi-device user experience.

-Multi-channel customer portals—The customer portal is essential to creating differentiated and customer-centric capabilities in the Web 2.0 world.

-Profitable services—To keep costs low and service quality high, SDP 2.0 supports powerful capabilities for consumers: voice, video and other content; social communities; search and navigation; and self-service customer care.

-Service delivery platform foundation—SDP 2.0 builds on the functions and features that make service delivery platforms essential, including support for dynamic, flexible creation of end-user services; reduced development risks; consistent provision of end-user services; and controls over service execution. To these, SDP 2.0 adds new capabilities such as on-boarding, unified user information, and an open service creation environment.

Other supporting features include a third-party gateway to expose Web services to the developer community in a secure and policy-controlled way, and support for different operating and business models with third parties.

If a company is considering pursuing SDP 2.0, it should first conduct a diagnostic of its existing SDP capabilities. This should cover areas such as architecture/technology, governance framework, service delivery organisation and processes, available resources and skills, and collaborative capabilities.

SDP 2.0 in action
Assuming the diagnostic shows the organisation is ready, what does an SDP 2.0 implementation look like in practice? Accenture recently helped Turkcell , Turkey ’s leading mobile communications provider, to upgrade its SDP to facilitate new offerings such as music downloads, data services and transfers of digital photography.

A year after the launch, 50 application service providers and 53 content providers were able to offer more than 180 revenue-generating services over Turkcell’s network. Turkcell’s service delivery architecture is now acting as powerful enabler of innovation between the operator and the development community, resulting in richer applications for end-users.

This has given Turkcell a key competitive advantage, helping it advance towards high performance in several ways. The benefits Turkcell has realised include greater speed in bringing new services to market—from several days to one day—and increased subscriber usage of online services, with wireless application portal usage rising nearly 3,000% in the first month.

Companies such as Turkcell that have implemented SDP 2.0 capabilities have benefited from focusing on three keys to success:

-Clearly define SDP component priorities − using the four key functional groups: access, enablers, services and core. This approach enables clearly-identified priorities to be mapped onto phased deliveries.

-Avoid identifying the SDP with only a limited set of specific services − thereby eliminating the risk of designing what would be merely an SDP point solution.

-Link SDP capabilities to services − enabling business priorities to be aligned with the availability of the required capabilities.

High performance
To sustain growth in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, service providers need more effective service innovation and more rapid service creation. SDP 2.0 capabilities bring providers the opportunity to drive toward high performance by mitigating development and delivery risks, and speeding new services to market—while simultaneously lowering costs and optimising limited resources.

Angelo Morelli is a senior executive in Accenture’s communications operating group.