Think big – start small and business driven.

Many SDP investments have been driven by the hope that an exposure of service capabilities to 3^rd Parties and application developers would drive service innovation and generate new revenue streams. These expectations have become true messaging services but disappointed for the call control. For call management a SDP best practice shows consolidation potential with respect to legacy systems but limited interest from the Web 2.0 community. Identity Management has become a key candidate for the next generation network services, where operators must seamlessly integrate mobile, wireline, and internet businesses and technologies together, to provide customer centric and identity oriented services. While the introduction of new technology will help operators to reduce their CAPEX and OPEX, it must be assumed that Identity Management will be key part of the Next Generation service offering to prevent from revenue erosion to Web 2.0 operators. Identity Management services are not assumed to become great money-makers. They will potentially help non-Web 2.0 operators to fight churn. TelCos will have to invest into new infrastructure, but mainly to prevent revue erosion rather than to generate new revenue for new services. The decision to deploy Identity Management solutions and to provision identity services is not without risk. But the alternative could be catastrophic if customers start to abandon TelCos in favor of Internet-based voice, video, data, and mobile services. The Service Delivery Platform architecture approach facilitates service and feature interaction scenarios. The exposure of subscriber profile data is needed to enable scenarios where the operator (NetCo.) takes the role of an Identity Provider and the Web 2.0 operator (ServCo) takes the role of the service provider.