What You Need To Know Now…

Survey Sez: IT Procurement Up, Hosted-Service Adoption Grows Slowly
According to a Reportlinker.com report on U.S. ICT procurement and investment trends this year, U.S. enterprises are taking an optimistic approach toward IT investments, and their preference for hosted services also is gaining traction. However, mass adoption won’t come anytime soon because most U.S. enterprises prefer to buy technologies directly from suppliers and then deploy them on-site rather than using a hosted model, primarily because of the confidentiality of data or legacy systems already in place, the research firm says. There appears to be an emphasis on cost-cutting, with enterprises saying price is the most important criteria when choosing an ICT provider, requiring ICT vendors to develop new pricing models.
 
Ethernet Leaders Gain From Rollouts, Price Wars
The top 2012 U.S. business Ethernet providers, according to Vertical Systems Group, are (ranked in order of port share) AT&T, Verizon, tw telecom, CenturyLink, Cox, Level 3, XO and Time Warner Cable. Port shares were calculated using the base of enterprise installations of Ethernet services plus input from Vertical’s independent surveys of Ethernet providers. The group notes the U.S. market for retail Ethernet ports grew 24 percent in 2012, characterized by major backbone upgrades, new market rollouts, price wars and channel expansion. Ethernet access to IP VPNs and cloud connectivity were the fastest-growing apps.