The 4th annual SDP Asia Conference took place in Singapore from 27-28 October 2009.  It was as well attended as ever, with over 70 attendees from around the region.  Some of the operators presenting at the conference included:

• Krishna N Basudevan, GM, Information Technology, Aircel Ltd, India;
• Clark Lam, Director of Service Platforms in Consumer Products, SingTel, Singapore;
• Rahadian Krishna Sundara, Head of Business Research, R&D Center PT Telkom, Indonesia;
• Andrea Demaria, Project Manager Service Layer & Messaging Innovation, Telecom Italia, Italy;
• Alex Ibasco, Group Head, Strategic Business Development, Smart Communications, Philippines; and
• Dr. Jan-Bon Chen, Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan.

For me the key theme was a shift in the focus of the conference away from ‘why an operator should deploy a next generation SDP’ to commercial and operational performance improvement.  Operators such as SingTel and Telecom Italia were sharing their deployment experiences from 3 years of operations.  I show below a summary of some of the slides I found interesting at the conference.  In my opening presentation I claimed we’ve reached the end of the beginning in the SDP story, the focus must change from technology to how the SDP can transform operators so they remain relevant to customers as service providers, not just bit pipe providers.

My presentation at the conference was titled “SDP Evolution: Revolution, Convolution, Amalgamation or Elimination?”  I examined the impact the confluence of several critical technologies / developments have on the SDP such as: cloud computing/managed services; and open initiatives such as Joint Innovation Labs, GSMA’s OneAPI, OMTP’s BONDI, and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative).  Reviewing key trends in operators’ requirements and their competitive environment as web and telco converge on the handset.  Presenting a view on the current and likely future evolution of the SDP: will it change, get more complex, will silos finally consolidate, or will it simply go away?  A key message was the importance of API management for operators across the device, network and web.

On Thursday the 29 October I ran a one day workshop at the conference entitled: Application Stores, Developer Communities, Content, Games and Widgets: Strategic Market Review and Operator Opportunity / Risk Analysis.  A sample of the workshop is shown below.

I also presented at a supplier event during the week on why Operators need Developers, presentation is show below.  The week spent in Singapore was a turning point for me in the SDP journey.  SDP is now a core part of an operator’s capability set, the challenge now is how to use the capabilities provided to remain relevant to customers as service providers given the Over The Top (OTT) Tsunami that’s about to hit the industry.  What we’ve witnesses to date with Skype, Jahjah, Yahoo! IM, YouTube, and Hulu is only a trickle, the OTT business case now makes business sense.