Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
    market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

The importance of application platforms in telecoms

Service platforms are the foundation of revenue generation for service providers. Over time, they have gradually moved out of the intelligent network application and billing domain. The introduction of IP services and mobile services has changed the paradigm by speeding up the innovation of applications in the service providers' environments. We are now entering another phase of development of the application environment, during which service providers will horizontalise their application environments, drilling down into common capabilities which, orchestrated together, could provide the same services. This process will ultimately make service creation more simple, robust and richer.

Why Service Platforms?

Service Platforms is an Ovum RHK advisory service that taps into the unknown territory of vendor markets in the application domain. Drawing on Ovum RHK's expertise in network infrastructure and Ovum's strengths in understanding service provider's offerings, it provides vendors with:

• a comprehensive and granular view of their markets in the application area, providing vendor platform forecasts, vendor analysis and strategic reports on the service platforms markets
• a thorough view of the horizontalisation trend in the markets, gained through in-depth analysis of the IMS and IT service delivery platform markets.

What makes us unique?

Our business model allows us to develop a unique view of the market. Our Service Platforms analysts regularly advise service providers on the development of their strategies, on their vendor selection process and on the design of their service delivery environments. Our ongoing relationship with them allows us to gain an insider's view of the market for service platforms:

• we understand service providers' needs, as 80% of our telecoms clients are service providers
• we regularly collect data on RFPs and RFIs sent to the market by service providers. We analyse the RFPs, and track the resulting revenues for the vendors
• we have developed a detailed and proven vendor platform modelling capability.

Service Platforms consists of three key topic areas:

• IP Multimedia Subsystems: covering CSCF, MRF, HSS, SIP AS, PMS and GLMS. The IMS module provides an in-depth insight into how IMS is shaping up, likely implementation scenarios and how the different vendors are addressing the market
• Service Delivery Platforms: covering service execution, service orchestration, billing mediation and network mediation, this module sheds light on the service delivery platform market, analysing how the different reference architectures can be compared and which vendors are playing in this space - and how.

Who is the service aimed at?

This service is aimed at helping your company benefit from in-depth industry knowledge in the service platforms area. Typically, end users of our research are:

• business planning teams, which will be able to build their three-year plans using our actuals and forecasts
• product managers, who can gain through our research an understanding of the service provider requirements and of the competition
• product marketing teams, who will be able to position their solutions against the competition
• strategy teams, who will be able to gather industry insights about forthcoming deployments.
• technology marketing teams, which will be able to track developments of some specific technology components

Deliverables

Each module comprises the following four deliverables:

• strategic reports: Every month in each module a strategic report will be published, covering topics that are of specific importance to the vendors in the corresponding area. This report could be an interesting service provider approach to deployment, evolutions of the standards, new offerings in the market or vendor strategy analysis
• forecasts: Five-year forecasts at product level (including hardware, software, integration and support services), split at a regional level. Forecasts will be reviewed on a quarterly basis
• vendor analysis: Analysis of the competitive positioning of the vendors in the marketplace, reviewed on a quarterly basis
• comments: Short, strategic comments on the hot news in the industry.

Key questions that Service Platforms will answer

• What is the market potential for IMS? When will it take off?
• How can I design my service delivery platform strategy?

Your next move...

To find out more about Ovum's services, contact us at your nearest office or visit our website at www.ovum.com.