­A new research report has revealed that while Ericsson holds on to the top spot for service delivery platform (SDP) services revenue, as does Oracle for SDP software revenue, Huawei leads the overall SDP market and continues to display momentum that could very well displace Ericsson and/or Oracle from their leadership positions in 2011.

Researchers forecast that the worldwide SDP software and services market to reach $5.2 billion in 2015. Interest in API exposure continues to fuel momentum in the SDP market, as do operators’ app store strategies, although operators are increasingly regarding these initiatives as ways to differentiate their offerings in competitive markets as opposed to significant revenue opportunities. While consumer services continue to be a primary driver behind SDP market growth, they see an emerging opportunity in the B2B space, including using SDPs to support machine-to-machine (M2M) applications and cloud-based application delivery to the enterprise and SMB market.

The report also says that momentum around the cloud services opportunity will generate interest in using an SDP to support the on-demand, real-time service requirements associated with a cloud offering.

SDP markets growing the fastest include developing regions in Asia Pacific, Central and Latin America (CALA), and the Middle East, where operators’ SDP deployments have begun to pick up steam.