January 10, 2013

What You Need To Know Now...

2013: The Year Of The Bundle?
This year, IT buyers will be looking for stability and ways to prepare for the next five years in their business cycles. A just-released Ovum report notes enterprises are looking for greater reliability in their IT usage and, as a consequence, they want stability, capability and accessibility from their service providers, perhaps including longer-term commitments and extended-scope outsourcing contracts. As such, taking into account the growth in mobility, analytics and cloud, they may be looking to a single supplier to deliver these technologies, meaning bundling may become a more important piece of business-services sales.

AT&T Fibers Up
Fiber is more important than ever, and at least one major player plans to deploy even more of it, especially to benefits its wireless operations. Speaking at an investor conference in New York City, John Donovan, senior executive vice president/Technology and Network Operations at AT&T, pointed out “wireless networks have a tremendous wireline component.” And that means expanding fiber to reach an additional 1 million business-customer locations as part of the carrier’s Project VIP Plan, which calls for a $14 billion wireless/wireline broadband network expansion. Goals of this proactive fiber deployment are threefold: to increase business revenue growth, to accelerate provisioning, and to install more distributed antenna systems and small cells to help offload wireless traffic. This plan, of course, means more money for the chosen fiber providers, DAS developers and femtocell makers, but it may also mean more space for new operators that have to lease network space.