Top Ten Questions to Identify Market Leading Vendors

1. How many live implementations of the company’s platform in its current incarnation are actually in the market?
Many failed portal/download server/product category here vendors have now decided to call their products a service delivery platform. Make sure references are relevant and that a wide range of capabilities are actually being used.

2. How deep is the company’s activity within its reference customers?
A pilot or two is not deep. One or two low volume services is not deep. Serving up a large number of critical, high-volume services within the same operator is deep.

3. Does the company have references with the very large operators?
Reliability and scalability are more and more important as the value-added services market matures. Providing services for upwards of 10-15 million customers is substantially more demanding than providing services for smaller operators. If you’ve got real performance needs make sure your vendor can deliver.

4. Can the company demonstrate a global support capacity?
In how many countries / continents has the company demonstrated an implementation capability?

5. How many different types of services has the company hosted?
A Service Delivery Platform by definition must be broad. Just doing Java downloads is not broad. Just doing messaging is not broad. Broad is having a platform that supports everything from network integration to messaging to portal to downloads to charging to whatever the service provider has been able to imagine.

6. Can you provide manuals for all the previous versions of your product?
It’s easy for the marketing department to call the product 4.x or 5.x. Being able to produce a progression of manuals for the various product versions demonstrates that the rest of the company is actually producing what marketing sells.

7. Can the company demonstrate a history of innovation?
A company’s innovation depends on its vision and on its ability to incorporate market feedback and transform them into its next generation product. Being able to trace a logical historic product evolution bodes well for future innovation.

8. Does the company number more investment rounds than commercial implementations?
A curious effect tends to appear in the value-added services market. Those companies with less news about their commercial implementations tend to be the same ones with lots of news about new financing rounds to keep the company alive.

9. Does the company demonstrate a number of years with a consistent focus?
While the company may be on version 3.x or 4.x those versions may reflect dramatic swings in product strategy so that the current product is more like New Strategy 1.0 with a portal or other product representing the earlier versions. If you need solidity and scalability, make sure you’re buying a fully evolved product.

10. Is there a solid management team with a number of years in the company?
There are a lot of weak companies in the value-added services market. A key sign of company weakness is a recently changed CEO or other top management figure.