The analyst team at Frost & Sullivan’s Stratecast nailed their outlook on cloud services, saying they would move from being strategic to marketable in 2009 – and they did. They, along with others, got the demand for Ethernet right and said it would have been even stronger had standards for the network-to-network interface ever materialized. They were comfortable, for good reason, with their prediction that consolidation would continue for Tier 2 and Tier 3 telcos despite the economy. And they were sure right about advertising becoming a fierce battleground.
However, the team got a little over-enthusiastic about a few things. It projected bigger movement in the shift from a good old-fashioned network performance focus to one of application performance. “Enterprises still grappling with infrastructure issues have yet to demand end-to-end performance guarantees,” the report said.
And they thought over-the-top (OTT) video services would have matured more quickly. “OTT has not achieved anything like the consumer attention necessary to be called market leading,” the report said.
The team was perhaps toughest on itself in the area of the back office. The OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies team got a lot right, such as the growth of product life cycle solutions, the recognition of a need for a new service layer, the continued hesitancy of service providers to invest in real analytics for subscriber data and the growth in actual implementations of customer experience management solutions.
But it took itself to task for missing on other areas. They thought, for instance, that fulfillment and assurance functions would be working with a new inventory environment by now. The reality is that inventory has continued to prove difficult to replace. They thought BSS and OSS vendor consolidation would continue in the face of competitive and financial pressures. It didn’t. Buyers weren’t buying and sellers opted not to give their businesses away. Instead they reinvented themselves, trying new approaches, new product lines or new markets altogether.
Perhaps the biggest miss came with the projection that advanced advertising ecosystems of vendors would solidify and demonstrate full-blown interoperability in mobile and cable sectors. It is clear now that will take more time.
With fresh insights from its hits and misses – more hits than misses – Stratecast offered its predictions for 2010. Among them are that the enterprise will enter the cloud in earnest, but predominately in private rather than public clouds, choosing control, visibility and security over unpredictability. SMBs will increase their IT spending but choose to spend it with hosted or managed services providers. Demand for managed security services also will climb. Its transformations for businesses will accelerate.
On the consumer side, net neutrality could trigger another round of marginally viable network operators that will wind up as acquisition bait in the end. DOCSIS 3.0 will become a reality for most MSOs by the end of the year giving rise to the blended service. And POTS gets new life as a backup for telemetric and other services even as LTE and WiMAX become a reality in 2010.
To read the full, in-depth article at our sister site, Billing & OSS World, click here or on the source link below.
