SLA Mobile, has announced a new video to mobile solution specially designed for mobile operators and video content owners.

SLA Mobile, recently ranked by Deloitte as one of the top 10 fastest growing technology companies in the United Kingdom, has entered into a strategic partnership with New Zealand company Abdeus – which has developed a suite of enterprise proven video and media solutions.

SLA Mobile already has a relationship with Fox Mobile, a division of news corporation, and provides rich content to mobile subscribers across Asia.

Abdeus’ media delivery suite provides end-to-end content management and delivery – from content owner, to service provider to consumer. SLA Mobile ensures seamless integration between the Abdeus solution and the service providers’ service delivery platforms and content owners’ programming. The Abdeus suite incorporates the streaming platform and media server, a full CMS solution, video encoding and service level monitoring. SLA ensures integration into rating and charging engines, provisioning and BSS/OSS.

The combined SLA/Abdeus solution is a proven, scaleable, enterprise solution that supports live streaming and video on demand. All the main video formats are supported – MPEG4, Quicktime etc. – as well as the main video and audio compression protocols. All known 3G handsets are supported – including iPhone and Blackberry – and digital rights management (DRM) is integrated into the stream and download platform.

Download: Mobile to Video Overview

According to Philip Stanfield, SLA Mobile’s Head of Sales in EMEA:

“The benefits to be gained by operators and content owners alike in offering live streamed programming and video on demand to mobile devices are clear. They can achieve significant incremental revenue, and extended customer base, and recurring subscription based relationships across multiple channels.

“By working with SLA Mobile operators and content owners have the assurance of working with a proven high growth integrator and best of breed media delivery suite platform.”

SOA and “The Cloud” are all the rage at the moment. Putting your data online is old news. Now it is all about putting your business logic online. Architects are envisioning platforms where developers can interact with a business to help find synergies and better connect with customers. Ultimately, this can lead to the discovery of new markets.

For telco’s stakes are even higher. New markets would just be icing on the cake. The real motivator is to give people access to a rich, compelling platform – which can be monetized through data line rentals. Handsets have the potential to be the next great wave for computing and having a stake in controlling that platform could be very lucrative.

People new to SOA wonder what the problem is. Why is it so hard to put your business logic online? Can’t you just run your code through Apache Axis and be done with it? Well, sure – if you don’t have legacy systems. Or you have different systems serving the same function for different departments. Or you are concerned about granular data access security. Or you release new versions of your software and are concerned about compatibility with other systems. Or you want to expose your API’s in a uniform way. If these problems sound simple – then you probably haven’t given them enough thought.

Unfortunately, most of these problems are found exclusively in large organizations. A startup competitor who does everything through that slick new LAMP <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)> app is going to have an easier time of putting their business logic online then incumbents. Companies with complex systems need a clear strategy around how they want to share their systems with partners.

And here we have a problem.

The fact is there is nothing off-the-shelf which is going to dramatically improve your chances of success with such a complex endeavour. Sure, some vendors sell products which are helpful. But the concept of “The Cloud” is evolving at such a rapid rate that currently the only way to keep up is with a custom solution. It takes thought and hard work – no way around it.

There are some very promising solutions on the horizon. One solution to watch is Microsoft’s “Oslo <http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx> “. Olso represents a huge investment from Microsoft to create a generic solution to solve this problem. Of course there are two issues with silver bullets like this: First, they imply vendor lock-in. Second, it can take years before they are fit for production.

In the mean-time, the Cloud is coming. Without question, 5-10 years from now your partners will be creating mashups <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)> and programming against loosely coupled APIs supplied by a seemingly random collection of partners. If they are not using your APIs, then they will be using someone else’s. The competition is on.