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ITU and 3GPP standards. As the SCP is controlling phone calls, it is engineered to meet the exacting requirements for network equipment (NE) – “five nines” availability:  resilience to failure, upgrade with no down-time, hot swapping of components etc. The deployment requirements, the restricted ambition in terms of the range of services when the SCPs were designed, the tight vertical integration and severe structural rigidities mean that the end-user services are essentially pre-baked into the SCP. Adaptation of services has to be done by the SCP provider and is extremely expensive, often with very long lead times. It means that the Communication Service Provider (CSP) can only sell and market a limited range of standard, utilitarian services. They cannot experiment or innovate. They have only one supplier for any changes that they require, the business case for which often fails due to the high costs of SCP adaptation. Uniquely in a highly competitive marketplace, CSPs are handicapped in their ability to

compete by differentiating their offer in terms of its capabilities.

Traditional SCPs are characterised by high prices, inflexibilities, single source for changes, slow evolution and enhancement. As a CSP, once you have procured your SCP, you are a hostage to fortune. Well, at least everyone is in the same boat. But meanwhile voice minute price-points are in decline and all CSPs are under tremendous price pressure. And the insurgent VoIP-based, price-focused competitors are chasing hard.

It used to be like this in Enterprise IT. Enterprises bought a complete, vertically integrated stack of hardware, system software, and applications from a single vendor. This has all changed now. There are commodity hardware providers, system software providers and application software providers. There is competition within each layer. The competition has driven the price-points down, platform performance and flexibility up, and

A radically lower price-point than traditional SCPs:

Lower operational costs: Achieve rapid innovation, deployment, integration and ease of administration of new and variant services from an open marketplace of product and custom-build application providers and a much lower cost than using the SCP supplier.  

Agile innovation of telecoms services:  Services can be designed, implemented, and trialled in days rather than months – resulting in lower SCP OpEx spend.  

Augment existing SCP: No need to rip-and-replace the existing SCPs immediately; instead, co-exist with existing SCPs as a separate innovation platform to evolve and create new applications faster and at a much lower price-point.