From service delivery to application delivery in the telecommunication industry

Currently, in the Telecom industry all over the world the move towards service oriented infrastructures based on IP, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) can be observed and Communication Service Providers are opening parts of their core infrastructure and interfaces to third party developers. But there is a gap between application developer communities and the Telecom industry. The Telecom industry offers its services so developers can use them in their applications but developers don't have any incentives, tools or development environments that would help them to overcome the barriers of accessing the communication services in order to build converged distributed Internet-Telecommunication applications. This research work presents a concept for how to close this gap by evaluating the requirements of the different stakeholders and combining application store concepts (e.g. Apple AppStore, Google Market) with open telecommunication SDP architecture concepts. Outlined is a concept for Application Delivery Platforms (ADP) that extends the concept of SDPs by broadening the focus from re-usable services over application development and lifecycle management to end user applications on client platforms and devices.