SDPs available today tend to be optimized for the delivery of a service in a given technological or network domain (e.g. in telecommunications this includes: web, IMS, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc.).
[3][4] Telecommunications companies including Telcordia Technologies, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, Avaya, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent have provided communications integration interfaces and infrastructure since the early to mid 1990s.
Since SDPs are capable of crossing technology boundaries, a wide range of blended applications become possible, for example: The service delivery platform market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10% over the forecast period 2019-2024.
This represented the advent of the application server, a flexible compromise between the absolutes of the dumb terminal and the logic-heavy client PC.
Although entrants into the application server ring were many and varied, they shared common advantages: database vendor abstraction, open standard (mostly object-oriented) programming models, high availability and scalability characteristics, and presentation frameworks, among others.
In this new standards-supported environment, convergence of the voice and data worlds has become less a moniker for disastrous telecom/IT integration attempts and more a true avenue for the production of new and better consumer and business services.
In industry today multiple definitions of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) are used with no established consensus as to a common meaning.
The SDF definition provides the terminology and concepts needed to reference the various components involved, such as applications and enablers, network and service exposure, and orchestration.
Probably the best way of reducing these design and integration issues is to simulate the SDP on a small-scale system before the major project actually starts.
Many operators provide commercial scale/grade products such as bundled voice, web hosting, VPNs, mail, conference and messaging facilities to government and corporate clients.
SDPs can also be used to manage independent wireless-enabled precincts such as shopping malls, airports, retirement villages, outcare centres.
The implementation of standards such as SIP and SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) is becoming more prevalent.
Discussions that once centered on enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies and concepts have shifted into the SOA domain, favoring ideas like service composition over simple message adaptation and extract, transform, and load techniques.
SOAs need careful consideration if they are to meet the real-time demands placed on the SDP by the converged event-type services.
This hosted environment provides a number of service delivery components covering aspects such as authentication, identity management, usage metering and analytics, content adaptation, data format conversion, charging and payment.
Considerable changes in IT and Network architecture are required when implementing real-world, real-time, converged services, operational SDPs.
In addition it is difficult to realise from abstract diagrams what the real-world operational data model is and how many servers, databases or directories might be used or integrated to form converged services SDP and self-care functions.
Identity and Information Management: In order to specify or design a SDP we must determine what the customer and device service dimensions are.
The services the grouped identity receives might be authorized via name and passwords, but should only be enabled through entitlements that relate to product provisioning.
The question is: how are millions if not billions of events managed in fragmented systems, multiple database architectures or in fact frameworks?
SDP technologies and tool kits should address three fundamental issues:[citation needed] These three major system requirements actually dictate the architecture of a real-world operational SDP regardless of the "abstract labels" one applies to its logical models, SOAs, message bus protocols and server interconnects.
In support of SDP development and the evolution to real-time, agile services-delivery, next-generation systems should[citation needed] be considered.