Service delivery platforms may be all the rage, but almost any way you cut it the first service delivered via an SDP will be more expensive than more traditional methods of service creation.

That can make the building the business case for deploying an SDP difficult, but it shouldn’t dissuade service providers from taking advantage of the long-term advantages of building more horizontal, IT standards based SDP platforms, according to a panel of SDP experts speaking at ATIS TechThink conference panel Tuesday at NXTComm08.

Alcatel-Lucent has conducted detailed cost models of SDP deployments, and “what we found, is that it’s usually cheaper to do one application as a silo, if you look at that moment,” said Cindy Mills, managing principal, global practice for communications applications, at Alcatel-Lucent. “But once you get to about three applications, that’s when you start to get to break even. You have to look at the big picture.”

Service delivery platforms have emerged as a new horizontal application composition and orchestration layer – largely driven by IT-centric concepts like Web services and service-oriented application architectures – that enables service providers to more rapidly and efficiently deliver new services, including services built with an ecosystem of third party partners and developers.

“The biggest challenge I see for operators is that SDPs are not about technology alone, but about the right mix of people, process and technology,” said Brenda Connor, portfolio manager, service creation, delivery and management at Ericsson. “It’s about enabling an ecosystem and exploring the business models that this new ecosystem enables.”

Service provider Qwest addressed the fundamental question of how to get its SDP built by making SDP deployment a cross-unit strategic issue. The carrier brought together a team of network, IT, back-office and business executives to hash out its SDP strategy, building parts of its SDP itself and relying on vendors and integrators for others, said Andrew White, director, network application architecture, Qwest Communications

“You need executive support, but the challenge that for most executives their strongest suit is in finance,” White said. “If you look at the business case for service number one, SDP versus non-SDP, the non-SDP business case win. It costs more to provide reusability than not provide reusability.”

That said, by doing the extra work required to build an inventory of service components and features, future development can occur much more rapidly and affordably, White said.

“Any you build in an SDP, build for re-use,” he said. “If you define interfaces so they can be reused and think about them as service enablers, life will be much easier later on.”