Standards-based service delivery platforms to drive demand for interoperability testing and certification
LONDON, United Kingdom, -26 November, 2009- Research shows the changing times for the Asia Pacific service delivery platform market. Premonvision, the advisory and consulting firm, released today to clients a report that is based on confidential and anonymous interviews with operators in Asia Pacific, focusing on how the operators will develop their service delivery platforms up to 2012. “There is significant traction of standards-based managed services platforms, as operators in the region aim to delivery voice, video and music to a range of consumer terminals”, says Principal Advisor Carl Gressum, responsible for the research. “However, the operators that pursue these open architectures need to be very careful and thorough when testing services and devices for interoperability conformance, as vendors are prone to perform proprietary implementations of established standards, which creates vendor lock-in”, adds Gressum. Standards-based platforms will simplify the process of delivering services to a wide range of mobile phones, PCs, DVD players, game consoles and televisions.
In this research release 'green field' managed services operators were in the final evaluation stages of the interoperability specifications from the Open IPTV Forum and the IPTV Recommendations from the ITU-T. They were also in commercial discussions with managed video solution providers. Therefore, there are several imminent managed services deployments, where the Open IPTV Forum and the ITU-T IPTV Recommendations can greatly impact the outcome. The research reveals concerns as to whether the Open IPTV Forum really is an open standard, and not based on vendor specific products. While on the other hand there are concerns about the lack of freely available ITU-T SDKs (software development kit), and that the Recommendations may be perceived as Japan-centric.
Not only 'green field' operators are interested in open client terminals that can access managed services. Established providers are exploring how they can virtualise as much of the set top box infrastructure on the home network. “This is similar to some of the trends from the Western European research we recently released. However, there is less drive towards converged telecoms, energy and security services. There might be missed opportunities”, says Gressum.
The research report shows, in addition to the interest of decoupling services from terminals, how by 2012 an increased demand for video calling, music streaming and cloud computing in the region. With regards to cloud computing operators will face challenges in areas such as; how to attract developers and service providers, how to provide simple yet powerful SDKs, how to develop a viable business model, and how to create an open cloud that is not vendor dependent.
“Western Europe may have taken an early lead in the managed services market, such as for video, however, our research shows how Asia Pacific is set to catch up and leap ahead”, concludes Gressum.
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NOTE TO EDITORS
For more information Insights: service delivery platform, please contact Premonvision on +44 208 099 4084, contact the company here. There are also freely available industry comments here.
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ABOUT PREMONVISION
Premonvision is an advisory and consulting firm in the Internet services and consumer electronics market. It provides in-depth research and consulting services on operator strategies for the residential market, and the impacts of consumer electronics and IT on the services market.
