The success of Internet service providers is driving legacy telecom operators to transform their service-layer architectures and business models to extract a bigger share of revenue from the IP services value chain, according to the latest market study by Light Reading.
"Telecom transformation started on the infrastructure side with the disruptive development of all-IP networks, originally designed to make operators more competitive with one another," says Caroline Chappell, research analyst with Light Reading.
"But network transformation unleashed the power of the Internet, spawned a new breed of broadband service providers that feeds off it, and created further competition outside the traditional telecom business. These Internet competitors are now forcing telecom operators to look at business transformation."
Vendors have largely defined blueprints to support their broad visions for IT transformation, but they are in a race to build out the complete set of SOA interfaces for all the component services included in their reference architectures, Chappell says.
"The transformed IT layer is therefore being viewed by leading-edge telcos and vendors as a new source of revenue, with SOA component exposure leading to new types of managed service and software-as-a-service (SaaS) opportunities," she says.
Key findings of the Light Reading study include:
- After network migration and transformation, service-layer transformation is where the next big wave of telco investment will take place.
- Vendor service-layer transformation blueprints now erase the distinctions formerly made between the service delivery framework and the service management framework.
- Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, and Nokia Siemens intend to take on the IT systems integrators as they target telco service-layer transformation investment.
- Vendors are racing to build out the complete set of SOA interfaces to ease integration in their service-layer architectures.
