Virtualisation and connectivity have allowed a rebirth of hosted solutions. Today’s incarnation – cloud services – seek to provide large enterprises as well as small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with scalable, affordable and secure access to applications and infrastructure over public or private networks.

Lack of IT staff, high-cost IT resources, consumer adoption of social networking hosted solutions, a move towards simplified enterprise network environments, remote working, mobility and capital limitations are driving the technology industry towards cloud services. However, traditional channels to market and legacy vendors in the space provide large barriers to adoption for cloud solutions.

This report presents a five-year worldwide enterprise cloud services forecast by channel to market. This approach allows communications service providers (CSPs) and vendors to understand their unique positioning in the market and plan for future growth in the eight regions of the world.

Enterprise cloud services: worldwide forecast 2010–2015 by Analysys Mason answers the followingquestions:

• What is the global opportunity for cloud services for CSPs, vendors and registered IT partners?
• What is the large enterprise versus SME opportunity for cloud services?
• What is the opportunity for cloud services in developed Asia–Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Latin America, emerging Asia-Pacific, the Middle-East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Western Europe?
• Which key technology areas – applications and infrastructure – are leading the way into cloud services?
• Which application and infrastructure vendors are thought-leaders for cloud services?
• What are the market drivers for cloud services?

Retailers and service providers building new business models with premium tech support services

Parks Associates finds the development of remote online solutions will complement the growing premium tech support industry, including retailers and service providers, by providing improved marketing channels and enhancing automated and live support services. The international research firm forecasts U.S. revenues in consumer-oriented technical support services will approach $5 billion by 2014, with roughly 50% of the revenues coming from remote technical support services.

The development of remote services across a variety of channels, including broadband providers, Internet security vendors, PC OEMs, and CE retailers, will help meet the demand for premium technical support services, according to Parks Associates' reports Service Providers and Support Services: Analysis and Forecasts and Retailers and Support Services: Analysis and Forecasts.

Service Providers and Support Services: Analysis and Forecasts and Retailers and Support Services: Analysis and Forecasts analyze the markets for U.S. consumer technical support services. These reports examine support offerings from service providers, retailers, OEMs, and third-party software and support vendors. They combine the results from more than 50 industry interviews and Parks Associates' primary consumer data.

A new study from IBM shows that service provider executives are in general feeling positive about the current state of telecom. But consumers’ responses to survey questions could be a warning that prosperity is tenuous and new business models need to be figured out very soon.

IBM experts conducted one-on-one interviews with 60 C-level executives from 40 service providers and 7722 consumers in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region for its report, "Telco 2015: Five Telling Years, Four Future Scenarios."

Ekow Nelson, the executive in charge of IBM’s business development, spoke exclusively to Connected Planet about the study. He acknowledged that most operators around the world considered this a “glorious” year, driven by the rapid diffusion of mobile telephony and emerging-market expansion. And with the rise of mobile broadband and new devices like the iPad and sophisticated dongles and netbooks, mature markets (especially North American markets) have seen revenue contributions that have made up for the voice decline experienced in 2008 and early 2009.

But despite auspicious beginnings and predictions for this year and the next five years, Nelson warned that consumers’ answers to survey questions could be a red flag, as economic pressures might force consumers to cut back on communications spending in the upcoming years and make different choices about providers.

While most consumers said the economic crisis did not yet impact their communications spending, many indicated they would switch to fixed bundles or defer upgrades and even consider cutting back spending on mobile if they felt a crunch. Willingness to cut mobile spending was highest in Spain and Germany, followed by the U.S., U.K., the Netherlands, Australia and lowest in China.

About 33% of those surveyed said they would consider cutting mobile spending between 10% to 20%, Nelson said, adding that if this happened on a broad scale, it could trigger consolidation and pose problems, particularly for small- and medium-sized operators.

When consumers were asked who posed the greatest competitive threat to their current choice for services, the majority (76%) indicated that Internet companies, voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers and social networking players would be the first they would consider. Following those were cable and satellite (34%) and mobile device manufacturers (29%).

There was also evidence that over-the-top (OTT) communication services are challenging telco-controlled services. The greatest adoption and growth potential of OTT communication services existed among younger consumers in the survey.

The operators surveyed in markets approaching mobile saturation (North America 92%, Western Europe 100%+) agreed that growth continues, driven by new devices and fixed/mobile substitution, as well as churning to other providers. But though that growth is real, the realization of significant revenues is not. “The operators verified that though mobile broadband is still growing steadily, its revenue contributions are nowhere near voice services,” Nelson said. “They said that unless there is another technical innovation like mobile, they foresee a significant challenge going forward.” (See: "Four future scenarios for the global communications market" below.)

 For most of the operators surveyed, the biggest issue they face is finding a sustainable strategy to balance bandwidth demands with pressures to generate revenue and cut costs. “With video and non-voice traffic creating bottlenecks, the majority of operators admitted it is becoming much more expensive to provide services,” Nelson said. He believes this will continue to push operators to abandon the unlimited data plans that currently hinder them. Part of the discussion for a solution centers around tiered pricing or allocation of resources and bandwidth to profitable customers. “Some of the biggest concerns revolved around regulatory uncertainty for things like Net neutrality and mandates to carry other providers’ traffic at regulated prices, which would hinder their ability to impose variable charges and tiered pricing,” Nelson said.
 
 Read the complete article in Connected Planet Online

Ran Klier, VP Cordless and VoIP Product Management, DSP Group,  will talk about operator business models with CAT-iq: how are operators using CAT-iq in their service and product offerings to increase ARPU and customer retention.

Technicolor announced that it has been selected by Grupo Hevi, one of the five biggest cable television operators in Mexico, to deliver a complete class 5 residential and business telephony solution. Based on Technicolor’s Cirpack softswitch, it provides high quality voice over IP services over Grupo Hevi’s digital cable network, with advanced services including IP centrex for business users and secure gateways for the rest of the telephone network.

The Technicolor Cirpack softswitch is a widely used and highly regarded voice over IP solution. It is built around a high density and high availability solution based on redundant hardware, providing excellent security and quality of service combined with unique space and energy efficiency. Grupo Hevi’s implementation is based on a centralized control architecture capable of managing up to 32 distributed media gateways for excellent flexibility.

Because it is built on open standards, Cirpack is capable of handling multiple telephone protocols and interfaces through its integrated media and signaling gateways. It supports all advanced interconnections including SIP, SS7, ISDN and R2 as well as MGCP/NCS, H.248 and V5.2 for access. Built into the software is the full range of legacy and latest IP functionalities to provide a feature-rich offering to domestic customers and business tools – including IP centrex – to enterprise subscribers.

INTRACOM TELECOM, a part of Sitronics, an international telecommunication systems vendor in the EMEA region and SoftAtHome, a software provider of home operating platforms that help Service Providers deliver convergent applications for the Digital Home, have signed a strategic partnership. The integration of INTRACOM TELECOM’s Full Service Content Delivery Network (fs|cdn™) Solution on the SoftAtHome Operating Platform (SOP), will enable the seamless provision of IPTV services with OTT and Smart Home applications.

SoftAtHome provides an open, ubiquitous and carrier class software platform that enables Service Providers to create innovative and convergent applications for the Digital Home. Service Providers and third party application developers can use the APIs and combine services such as voice, video, user interface, security, network access, connectivity or management, and deploy them across different devices in the home including Set Top Boxes (STB) and Home Gateways (HGW). The SoftAtHome Operating Platform (SOP) STB Edition enables telecom operators and service providers to not only deploy IPTV, Satellite or Terrestrial solutions but also to combine them with OTT services including Internet TV, catch up TV, sharing of media content inside the home through DLNA and third party applications such as social services or games.

INTRACOM TELECOM’s award-winning fs|cdn™ IPTV solution enables telecom operators to securely and efficiently provide a host of IP-based entertainment services, including Broadcast TV, Video on Demand, Digital Personal Video Recording, as well as advanced infotainment services such as on-screen instant messaging and chatting, news, and caller ID among others, allowing for a highly personalized TV experience.

The combined solution offers a complete end-to-end platform for Telecom Operators who want to rapidly deploy ready-to-use IPTV services with VoD, PVR, media sharing and third party applications, across their STBs of choice. Telecom Operators can also customize or develop their own services by leveraging the variety of standard development environments offered by the solution: Java, Flash and HTML.

In response to the requirements of existing and new customers, Comarch has extended its offer to cable operators competing with other service providers. Although TV services remain the fundamental revenue stream, significant income growth originates from high-speed Internet and telephony services, highlighting why companies traditionally perceived as cable operators are transforming towards Multi-Service Operators (MSO).

Within this transformation process, cable operators must modify their offers and tailor them to the individual customer's needs, in order to deliver a truly rewarding customer experience, thus retaining existing and winning new customers. Changes to the ways in which cable operators address their customers' means improvements to their BSS/OSS systems are required. For this reason, Comarch reaches out to cable TV providers with its end-to-end solution for cable operators.

This dedicated Comarch solution for Cable Operators helps raise the revenue per subscriber and is flexible enough to support any future expansion of the operator. It is also focused on removing all limits to marketing creativity and ensuring error-free billing, complete control and security of financial operations, field force automation, robust support in day-to-day operations and more. 

Orange is today ramping up its planned roll-out of mobile HD voice services in Europe with the addition of France, Spain and Luxembourg to its 2010 roadmap. Mobile HD voice is the second critical strand in Orange’s HD voice strategy, building on from the highly successful delivery of HD voice services for VOIP in 2006. Following technological developments, Orange has confirmed that its UK customer trial of mobile HD voice will start from Spring and run for three months.

In September 2009, Orange became the world’s first operator to commercially launch a mobile HD voice service in Moldova, announcing plans to bring mobile HD voice to the UK and Belgium in 2010. In addition to mobile HD voice, Orange was also the first operator to launch HD over VOIP, first in France and shortly to be rolled out to Poland and Spain. 

Customers using mobile HD voice services will benefit from the best possible sound quality, including a much richer and natural sound that is capable of conveying emotion significantly better than an ordinary handset. It helps people hear better in noisy environments, providing clearer voice conversations and creating a much closer feeling of proximity between both parties, almost as if callers are actually in the same room. 

HD Voice uses the AMR-WB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband) speech codec.  This provides excellent audio quality due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50–7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300–3400 Hz.  The AMR-WB delivers significantly enhanced sound quality whilst utilising the same network resources.

Voice services are expected to continue to be the largest revenue generator worldwide, accounting for 69% revenues on a global basis and for no less than 60% in any region in 2014 (Ovum).

The Radicati Group - an independent market research firm - has published a whitepaper looking at the role of high fidelity HD Voice services have in business class fixed-mobile-convergent (FMC) services for the Small-to-medium business (SMB).

As the battle for the elusive SMB customer moves into FMC, this whitepaper looks at how HD Voice can differentiate and add value to the network operators' offerings for business subscribers.

Whilst voice services are the backbone of most network operators, the audio fidelity of voice telephony has not improved in over 80 years. With the relentless drive towards high definition services, network operators must address voice quality or risk loosing traffic to higher quality providers.
 
HD Voice has the potential to change voice telephony for ever. With HD Voice conversations are clearer, more precise and more effective. Studies show HD Voice calls last longer than regular fidelity calls, with participants reporting the conversations as being "more natural" and "more comfortable", with less time spent "deciphering" what is being said. 
 
This paper looks at how HD Voice can both, reinvigorate voice telephony, and how it can transform the role of VoIP from a "toll-evasion" option to a real value-added service. Ultimately, this paper looks to answer how network operators can capitalise on the $103 billion dollar opportunity of high fidelity, value-added VoIP services.

read the whitepaper.

communigate hd voice.pdf (424,97 kb)

IBM this week announced new development centers around the globe to help telecom operators develop new services that fit within today’s evolving communications business models.

Three standalone development centers will be located in China, South Africa and Malaysia. A fourth, in partnership with vendor Comverse, will set up shop in France.
The centers will focus on helping providers build new applications and services based on IBM’s Service Provider Delivery Environment 3.0 framework and will encompass software and hardware from a variety of business partners, IBM said.

Setting up global development centers has become standard practice for large telecom vendors, enabling them to handle local development needs but also in some cases to offer outsourced operational services as well.

The IBM Telecommunications Solution Center in China will operate as a subset of IBM’s already established China Development Labs. Among the work already underway there including efforts by China Mobile to deploy a new service creation platform.

IBM’s South Africa location, in Johannesburg, will serve all of Sub-Sahara Africa, IBM said. But Africa is also served by three additional solution center locations in Nairobi, Lagos and Cape Town. Among the work being done at the South Africa location is a proof of concept solution called "The Enterprise Applications for IMS + SDP for Mobile Healthcare" – which showcases how the health care industry can use standards-based telecom applications to improve the delivery of medical services.

IBM is opening a third center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Finally, the new Comverse Center of Excellence will work within the IBM Telecom Solutions Lab in France. The center will focus on BSS/OSS and service delivery platform solutions support.