Service Delivery Platforms

Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) are a new category of telecommunications infrastructure that enables rapid development and deployment of new converged multimedia services, from basic telephony services to complex audio- and videoconferencing. SDPs typically provide a variety of environments, including a service creation environment, a service control environment, and a service orchestration and execution environment.

SDPs are playing an increasingly important role in enabling the integration of telecom and Information Technology (IT). That’s partly because SDPs are based on open, standards-based technologies that originated from the IT world, including Web services. As a result, SDP-based telecom systems are available from a wide variety of telecom and IT vendors.

SDP products incorporate many of the VoIP system components and decomposed functionality of the next-generation VoIP networks. SDPs integrate IP media server capabilities into the SDP service creation environments using open, standards-based protocols such as SIP, VoiceXML and MSML. At service runtime, media server capabilities are then used by the SDP service control and execution systems to seamlessly deliver the IP audio and video packet processing required for the IP communication services and features.

• IP Media Servers for Enterprise Communications