According to a study conducted by market research firm Infonetics, Operators have named Huawei, Ericsson top SDP suppliers.

The firm on Monday released excerpts from its new SDP Deployment Strategies and Vendor Leadership Global Service Provider Survey. This survey explores operators’ service delivery platform deployment strategies, including the business and application drivers behind their SDP investments, their priorities in selecting an SDP supplier, and their perceptions of the major vendors playing in the SDP market.

"API exposure was the name of the game in this year's survey, with operators naming it as a top application and business driver behind their SDP investments," notes Shira Levine, directing analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research. "Operators clearly understand the value of building innovative content ecosystems, and believe that exposing network assets such as location, call control, messaging and presence information is key to attracting third party content developers that can help them achieve that."

In an open ended question asking operators who they consider to be the top three SDP vendors, operators most often named Huawei, Ericsson, HP, IBM, and Oracle (Oracle held the top spot in Infonetics’ 2011 SDP survey) Operators ranked Oracle highest for SDP technology, and ranked IBM and Accenture highest for their business modeling capabilities, likely reflecting their cross industry experience with process management. Messaging services and converged payment and billing are highly rated applications driving SDP deployments.

"Faster time to market" topped the list of business drivers behind respondents' SDP investments, tied with generating revenue via an API exposure strategy. Support for machine to machine (M2M) services is gaining traction as a driver for investing in SDPs.

For its SDP Deployment Strategies and Vendor Leadership survey, Infonetics interviewed purchase decision makers at mobile, incumbent and competitive telecom operators in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa that have SDPs in their networks now (76%) or plan to by the end of 2013 (24%). The 20 page report includes SDP deployment strategies, drivers and inhibitors associated with SDP investments, SDP vendor selection requirements and SDP supplier rankings on various criteria. SDP suppliers cited by service providers in response to vendor related questions in the survey include Accenture, Aepona, Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, Ericsson, Huawei, HP, IBM, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Oracle.