Services Delivery Platform Vendor Matrix

This Vendor Matrix presents an assessment of some of the main vendors in the SDP market, regarding their ability to supply a full range of SDP elements and their engagement with the rest of the vendor community. The latter is important in enabling operators to have confidence in compatibility and interoperability as well as future product support. This assessment is based on two criteria: Innovation and Implementation. Each has been weighted to give a total score out of 100. The scores shown later are in the form xx.xx, combining the Implementation and Innovation totals. The main variation is in Implementation rather than Innovation.

The Implementation score is derived from how well the vendor is equipped to supply a complete system, alone or with partners; its announced orders or trials; and its ability as a system integrator. There are cautions because some trials or orders may not be public knowledge and the vendors may be able to provide more resources through partnerships, which still might not be disclosed because of confidentiality. This assessment is made at a single point in time and, since the industry is developing quickly, it must be read with that in mind.

The Innovation score is derived by measuring the system vendor's R&D budget and the number of industry partnerships it has within the SDP industry. Since we are not able to measure the SDP portion of the R&D budget, we have taken a view based on the total budget. We also might not have identified all the possible partnerships because of confidentiality.

Rankings



After individual scores are established for Innovation and Implementation using the above criteria, an overall company score is established using the Root Mean Square (RMS) method:




The resulting overall scores are then ranked and used for percentile comparisons.

The RMS method, in comparison with a straight summation or average of individual innovation and implementation values, rewards companies for standout performance.

For example, using this method a company with an innovation score of 9 and an implementation score of 1 would score considerably higher than a company with a score of 5 in both areas, despite the mean score being the same. ABI Research believes this is appropriate as the goal of these matrices is to highlight those companies that stand out from the others.