This paper presents the results of a study on the leverage of web 2.0 technology and open business models to expand service providers’ IMS and SDP (Service Delivery Platform) and offer new services and service composition capabilities for existing business partners such as MVNO, ISV, ASPs but also sophisticated end users, so called “prosumers”. We have collected the requirements from different users and customers which were all converging to an expansion of existing environment to offer a much more ‘internet’ like service offering : simple APIs, mix of content and communication capabilities, graphical composition tools, open portal, widgets, developer communities, easy to share, try and comment set of services, etc. Based on that, we did an evaluation of different tools and technology and defined an architecture that could meet these expectations while leveraging existing IMS-SDP environments and built a proof of concept.

From Walled Garden to Long Tail …
Today most service providers offer a mix of ‘walled garden’ services such as voice and SMS, which are developed/hosted/sold by the service provider, and ‘partner services’ which are co-developed and sold via some cross-selling models between the service provider and some business partners. As the market evolves with, on one side, more demand on the consumer side for personalized content and internet integration, and on the other side, demand for more flexible and dynamic business relationships, service providers need to explore new technologies and new business models to basically open up their infrastructure to enable more innovation and more usage of the underlying capabilities, while building more value on their service hosting and delivery capabilities. This drives the so called ‘long tail’ business model and associated technical evolution of service platforms.

IMS-SDP service composition evolution
Service Delivery Platforms today are not really defined by any standards, even though OMA for instance has attempted to define some aspects of it, but vendors tend to align around some common architecture and set of components that combine a layer of service enablers, including IMS service enablers, a layer of service orchestration and a layer of common functions such as service registry, policy management, charging and service exposure via a portal or technologies such as java APIs or web services.

Download pdf IMS, SDP and Web 2.0 : Where are the services ?