The 6th SDP Asia Summit was held in conjunction with 3 other conferences:
Smartphone Applications & Operating Systems (OS) Asia
3rd Mobile Value Added Services Asia
OSS/BSS & Convergent Billing Asia

The SDP Asia Summit and Convergent Billing Asia were run as a single stream which made sense as they are both platforms necessary to support the services discussed in the other two streams on VAS and smartphone applications.  This conference brings together critical parts of the Services Domain, across the network, devices, services and billing.

Too often such conferences are siloed, separated, while here in Asia they are brought together.  This is important as it is focusing on operators’ needs in bringing relevant service domain components together for a cross-domain discussion and sharing of experiences and ideas.  The conference was attended over 100 people, mostly operators.  Many attendees found the major differentiator for this event is it promotes open and frank discussions throughout the event.

The operator presentations were very good; TanTo Suranto, Integration Platform & System, SOA Lead at Telecom Indonesia gave an excellent review of their experiences in deploying an organization-wide SDP.  Tanto identified 7 keys to success for the project, shown below.  The Services Domain report echos many of these issues across its case studies.

• Support from BoD (Board of Directors)
• Structure should be strong enough
• Staffing fully dedicated (core team)
• System should be clearly defined
• Staging the quick win
• Skill development arrangement
• Score Card your weekly activity

Dr Ampai Pornprasertakul gave a frank and insightful presentation on the challenges in implementing Converged Billing.  Her story though common to many operators is rarely explained with such clarity and frankness, providing important insights and lessons for operators and suppliers alike.

I gave a presentation, shown below, entitled “Making Telecoms the Essential Spice of Every Business Ecosystem: The Slow, Painful Rise of APIs in Telecoms.”  The presentation reviews:

• The importance of APIs to telecoms
• Fundamental Misconceptions
  • Its about Business not Technology
  • Its across the Tail, not the Long Tail
• Quantifying the opportunity
• Why all businesses are moving to APIs
• Understanding the Telecom situation
• BlueVia Case Study
• Verizon Case Study

At the conference I ran a one day post-conference workshop entitled: The New Wave of IT and Telecom convergence: Using SOA for the Telecom Services Layer to drive Service Innovation.  In the workshop we cover 20+ case studies on SOA deployments for SDPs.  I show a sample of some of the material below.

The combined conference proved a success in bringing together the people involved in services / applications and the infrastructure supporting them.  Next year a focus on particular themes within this framework, for example TV Everywhere, or Enterprise Communication Enabled Business Processes, or M2M, or Virtually Network Operator services would enable the excellent framework created by this combined conference to then focus on emerging problem areas for the region.