Service delivery platforms (SDPs) – which rapidly moved from concept to reality in some service provider networks – are now getting a second, more considered look as carriers wrestle with how best to exploit and manage these new platforms.

That was one of the key takeaway messages from a one-day SDP Summit held this week in San Francisco, sponsored by the TM Forum, according to Dave Milham, distinguished TM Forum fellow. Milham helped present the forum’s view of the evolution of SDP products and the forum’s own service delivery framework (SDF), an evolving architecture for telco service creation.

The summit was held as the TM Forum last week put the finishing touches on the second phase of its SDF work, expected to be formally released within a few weeks.

“SDPs were conceived as a flexible way of putting services together,” Milham said. “What’s become apparent is that many service providers have a number of SDPs that must now interoperate and behave as one logical SDP, across both multiple vendor platforms and even across different service providers.”

Despite the amount of work from the TM Forum and elsewhere to define SDPs and next-generation service-enablement, it’s still an open question how SDPs fit into existing telco management environments and how such platforms can be leveraged to create services that span multiple operators or software providers, Milham said.

What is emerging is the idea that well-implemented SDPs adhere to a few core standards and architecture principles but then “evolve rapidly in small incremental steps. You can equate this to biologic systems,” said Milham. “That’s a different model of how to innovate when compared to what’s been traditionally done in the telecom service provider domain,” where systems tend to be highly specified and at times over-engineered upfront.

“The proposition is to start with a fairly simple model, with a small number of concepts, and evolve quickly and create more complex services from this simple model,” he said.