released a report Monday on the relatively esoteric space of service delivery platform (SDP) software, which helps carriers create and deliver services to subscribers and then bill them accordingly. Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and Chinese phone maker Huawei are all in this market, which grew 16% between 2010 and 2011, to $3.2 billion, and which Levine believes will grow to $5.8 billion by 2016.

Why should a consumer care about SDP software? Its use means that carriers such as AT&T and Verizon may very well get into the app store space to compete with Apple and third-party app stores like . The carriers' differentiation: The ability to offer Android and browser-based applications in a one-stop-shopping environment. "AT&T learned a valuable lesson with the iPhone," says Levine. "They're not part of the revenue value chain [for iPhone apps]."

As a result, she says, "[carriers] are envisioning OS-independent app stores, which consumers could access no matter what device you had and even do so across multiple devices."

How these carrier stores would differentiate themselves is really "the million-dollar question," says Levine. "How can they create something that will complete with Apple? They know how to create walled garden applications, but they have to figure out how to work in [an] open ecosystem."