Service delivery manages to be a headache for CSPs of every sort, worldwide. Delivery of new and increasingly complex services has gotten faster, more accurate, and more convenient for the end consumer, but with better service delivery comes higher customer expectation, of course. Therefore, the need to do more, faster, is relentless.

And is that any less true now, with times tough and getting tougher? Perhaps end consumers are not as likely to expand service and go after new applications all the time, but there's even more demand for existing services to be reliable and reasonably priced, lest they fall victim to the personal expense downsizing that occurs in every home in every household budget review every day.

The demand is to do more, faster, with less.

Against this landscape, there are vendors in the OSS/BSS space who are offering solutions for doing just that. We explore both the need for change and the solutions that offer to meet that need in this issue of Pipeline.

This month, we explore the realities of the modern SDP, and hear some perspective from LTC, International on the hard truths behind the magical thinking of SDPs. We also hear from industry leaders from Sigma Systems, Oracle, InfoVista, and Tektronix on how services can be delivered more quickly and more effectively in an increasingly demanding market. This month, we also continue a series of articles by Ed Finegold on how some of the major BSS players face the market's big challenges and overcome them.