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Traditional service delivery platforms have one product catalog in the ordering system, another in the provisioning system, and another in the billing system—plus a stand-alone shopping cart application. Because of the large number of components involved in delivering cloud services, service providers either need a mechanism for tight integration across catalogs or, preferably, a single catalog across all systems. Having multiple product catalogs has always been difficult for telecommunication service providers, who must maintain up to a dozen catalogs in different systems. Without a well-designed cloud service delivery platform, cloud services will simply take this mess to the next level.
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Service providers need to have a Cloud service delivery platform of interdependent, cross-platform components. |
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platforms cannot manage such
complexity, nor do they typically have
enough internal integration points to
provide a seamless experience to both
user and service provider.
Attempts to integrate multiple vertical
platforms typically end up as partially
connected stacks of parallel
functionality. For example, even if
integrated systems can provision
multiple service components at once,
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Because of the scale of any reasonably sized cloud service provider, the back end of its underlying service delivery platform has to be highly automated, eliminating the need for manual intervention in processing, provisioning, and managing the cloud services. Automation is needed not only to support the need for an extremely high degree of self service, as described above, but also to maintain margins and profitability. For example, a $10 per month service simply cannot afford any manual operations—or even a single support ticket.
The Way Forward
To succeed at delivering profitable
public cloud services, service providers
need to have a complete cloud service
delivery platform, managing a large
number of interdependent cross-platform components in perfect order.
Traditional vertical service delivery
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de-provisioning usually must be
performed manually in each system.
While such an approach might be
acceptable for traditional services (e.g.,
voice and data services that people
keep for extended periods of time),
cloud services are often consumed on-demand, and with the addition of each
new service component typically
requiring reintegration of existing
systems, the resulting service levels
would be unacceptable in today's
competitive marketplace.
In short, a complete cloud service delivery platform must be purpose-built for the cloud, with the goal of providing the full set of services and a seamless user experience for the entire service lifecycle, from ordering to consuming to de-provisioning. Given the innate complexity of cloud services, this is the only way to ensure profitability.
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