According to Infonetics Research, telecom subscriber data management revenues, including software and services for mobile and fixed line networks, reached $792 million in 2012.
The research firm notes that operators are increasingly looking to take on the role of a trusted identity provider, handling authentication and authorisation transactions between customers and third parties such as retailers, banks, and over-the-top providers. For example, for South Africa-based service provider Cell C, the increase in subscriber numbers, call volume, and new services resulted in the failure of its home location register in terms of capacity and reliability.
To overcome such challenges, global operators are increasingly adopting subscriber data management systems provided by telecom equipment vendors. For example, Cell C deployed the Huawei SingleSDB solution to build a new subscriber data management system (SDM). This helped the operator overcome issues in their legacy networks. It was able to integrate its databases for all subscriber data by deploying unified storage, management, and service provisioning.
Going forward, the SDM software and services market is expected to grow to $1.86 billion by 2016. The market will be driven by network modernisation initiatives, particularly 4G deployments by the operators which is leading operators to separate back-end SDM databases from front-end applications to consolidate subscriber data.
