Survey Sez 11/30/12

Although Yankee Group has valued the mobile broadband marketplace at $1 trillion, there continue to be challenges. For example, the OTT threat is eating into operator revenues, it says; last year, mobile operators worldwide generated $769 billion in voice and consumer messaging service revenue but, by 2016, this will fall to $697 billion. Says Yankee Group Vice President Declan Lonergan, “Not only are [operators] tasked with investing in new infrastructure and rolling out next-generation LTE networks at an ever-faster pace (in a decidedly harsh economic climate), but they must also find innovative ways to monetize those new networks, all while fighting increasingly intense competition from OTT vendors intent on stealing away their bread-and-butter voice and messaging revenue”…“There is no doubt, the cloud has come of age,” notes Sam Barnett, directing analyst/Data Center and Cloud at Infonetics Research. “While investments in cloud outsourcing are small in comparison to internal IT/data center spending, they are growing each year, with the number of enterprise organizations turning to cloud technology to manage budgets and transform service delivery increasing significantly in the last two years. The cloud is no longer about outsourcing IT infrastructure and functions—it’s about right-sizing them.” Survey respondents cite Microsoft, IBM and Cisco as the top cloud service providers, “although unexpected vendors dominate the cloud landscape in key technology deployment areas,” he adds.