TM Forum says multiple types of service delivery platforms essential

The TM Forum has released a report that says that it’s essential for service provider higher-layer success to recognize that there’s more than one kind of service delivery platform (SDP). OK, we agree that a single-mission SDP model would be destructive, but the real insight is that SDPs are only platforms and that some overall service-layer architecture is necessary to provide a framework into which the SDPs, or servers, or whatever, are deployed.

The biggest problem with the conceptualization the TMF has had in the past is that it wants to think about management without logic. It views the service layer as something apart from the service management process and linked only through traditional management interfaces.

We think that doesn’t scale even today and would be hopelessly out of kilter for future social-driven applications. The future demands a blending of logic and management into a common orchestration. There’s still no standards-body sanction for that view, as far as we know, but telcos like it a lot. Eventually that will force changes in the market, whether driven by traditional equipment vendors or other players.