 |
The battle is raging between NTP and BlackBerry. What to expect? Lots of legal wrangling and maybe a shutdown ruling, but RIM won't stop service -- opting instead to try out its workaround or rush to settle. What to do now? Because the probability is not 0%, clients should put limited effort into researching alternative technologies and prioritizing users who need to migrate in the unlikely event of a shutdown. What's the future of wireless email?
After much discussion, Vonage filed for a $250 million IPO. The company has shown impressive revenue and subscriber growth rates, but it has also suffered huge losses due to high marketing and SG&A expenses. While Vonage leads the industry today, the company will be severely challenged by an increasing number of competitors, high marketing costs, and limited product differentiation.
What to expect in 2006? Contact centers must continue to advance to meet changing business requirements and provide customers with advanced communication and collaboration capabilities.
The ability to roam internationally is critical for regular enterprise travelers. But CDMA users have far fewer options than GSM users. CDMA-CDMA roaming is available for North American customers in fewer than 30 countries, whereas GSM users typically can roam in more than 150 countries. CDMA operators need to offer corporate customers better options, or they risk losing very large multinational corporations to rival GSM carriers.
2004 saw the widespread emergence of commercial 3G services in Europe. To see if consumers will sign up for these services, we updated our Western European mobile user forecast. We also broke it down into country-specific forecasts for Germany, France, and the UK.
After a decade of avoiding complex quality of service (QoS) attributes in an IP network, Forrester's clients are showing renewed interest. Why? Because shifting to IP-based apps and converged multimedia networks can be easily foiled by IP's best-effort nature. But QoS is not that simple. Forrester found that firms shouldn't believe vendor hype and must avoid three misconceptions: that QoS is standard, easy to set up, and part of a static configuration. To combat the problem, limit QoS to only where it's needed -- like in the wide-area network (WAN) -- and use optimization appliances like those from Juniper Networks, Orbital Data, and Riverbed Technology to avoid unnecessary QoS requirements.
|
|
|
The Forrester Wave™: North American MPLS Services, Q1 2006
To assess how well MPLS providers are supporting North American enterprise customer requirements, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of 11 providers across 56 criteria. The result? AT&T leads the pack in both current offering and market presence.
MPLS is a relatively young network technology in North America, and its place is unique: It is the foundation for all common future multiservice networks. Thus, we didn't assign any service providers to the Leader section of our Wave evaluation. We believe that the road to an entirely new, common, interoperable network infrastructure will take many years. This study is an early snapshot of North American service providers' progress along that road. It examines the current state of the industry and the capabilities of four important US providers just as their mergers were being finalized -- pre-merger AT&T and SBC Communications, and pre-merger MCI and Verizon. Thus, the information that we obtained and the evaluations that we performed examine each of these carriers as standalone entities.
Future updates and snapshots, such as the one that we anticipate taking 18 months from now, will provide information on just how far the North American telecommunications service industry's commitment to a technology that it says is critical will have actually progressed.
Check out the upcoming Forrester Teleconference:
The North American MPLS Services Market Landscape
with Robert Whiteley
Monday, March 6, 2006, 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time
|
The majority of service providers that are discussed in this study, including the leader, are ranked as Strong Performers, with sizeable network and related investments in MPLS. Two regional providers, BellSouth and SBC, lie closer to the Contender ranking in overall assessment, but they are Strong Performers within their pre-merger serving regions.
The Enterprise Telecom Integration Opportunity
Large European firms have a complex set of telecom assets, spanning fixed and wireless services and wholly owned infrastructure. In the past three years, firms have selectively contracted service providers to integrate this telecom "estate" and thus eliminate complexity, accelerate IP transformation, and reduce costs. Since January 2002, European firms have signed deals worth more than 5 billion euros for telecom integration services. Service providers of many types are repositioning themselves as "telecom integrators" to address this burgeoning market. European firms should take stock of their telecom assets to determine the benefits of contracting service providers to create an integrated service and cost framework for the telecom estate.
From The Editor:
This has been a great kickoff quarter for the Telecom and Networks team. Our 2006 research theme is
communication transformations as it challenges and creates opportunities in carriers, companies, and vendors. We will be receiving
new survey data back from our second annual Business Technographics® North American And European Network And Telecommunications Benchmark Study within the month -- with lots of data on user adoption of advanced communication services, including MPLS, wireless, mobile applications, and speech technologies.
We are also rejuvenating our research into what Forrester calls the
X Internet -- the connection of the physical world to the digital world. Look for more research and forecasts on RFID and sensors in the months to come.
Help drive future telecommunications and networking research with the click of a button! Client Choice voting begins Tuesday, March 7.
Where We'll Be:
- Lisa Pierce will speaking at VoiceCon on March 9 on "The Role Of Carriers In Enterprise Voice."
- Maribel D. Lopez will be participating in at the Telecommunications & Media Customer Strategy Summit in Atlanta on March 6-7.
Please let us know what is of interest to you. Any and all feedback is welcome!
Ellen Daley
Vice President, Research Director
ellendaley@forrester.com
EMAIL: Email this issue to a colleague.
PRINT: View a printer-friendly version of this issue.
VIEW ARCHIVE: View past issues of First Look.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Call the Client Resource Center
1 866/FORRESTER (1 866/367-7378) or +1 617/613-5730.
EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you'd like to subscribe or unsubscribe to First Look, please go to your Email Subscriptions page.
|
|
|
Entire contents 1997-2006, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Forrester, Forrester Oval Program, Forrester Wave, Forrester's
Ultimate Consumer Panel, WholeView 2, Technographics, TechRankings, and
Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Forrester
clients may make one attributed copy or slide of each figure contained
herein. Additional reproduction is strictly prohibited. For additional
reproduction rights and usage information, go to www.forrester.com.
Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment
at the time and are subject to change.
Forrester Research, Inc., 400 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139
|
