Towards a CAPEX-free service delivery platform

The paper is aiming at analyzing the possibility for a telecommunication operator to decrease the fixed costs of service delivery, by reducing CapEx (Capital Expenditures) and transforming part of them into OpEx (Operational Expenditures). In particular, the paper analyses the advantages and the risks of moving a service platform on a cloud-based infrastructure, and investigates the impacts of adopting Open Source Software (OSS) solutions for deploying components of a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) and for delivering new services. The proposed approach is exemplified by means of an experimental case study, in which an OSS orchestration engine is deployed on virtual resources dynamically allocated by a cloud infrastructure.