While telcos tend not to shine when it comes to software-related businesses or vertical channels, they will need to improve in these areas to stay relevant in the New Year and beyond, according to industry analyst firm IDC (News - Alert).
In addition, telcos will need to expand their channel partner networks to scale their operations and reach out to more customers, ZDNet’s Kevin Kwang recently reported.
Just a few years ago, most telcos would not consider working with or acquiring software developers and building out their developer ecosystems, according to Sandra Ng, general vice president of ICT practice at IDC Asia-Pacific.
“This was not their core business and fell outside the comfort zone for many of these companies,” the report said.
However, traditional business models are no longer relevant thanks to cloud computing, which is quickly becoming a lucrative market. Earlier this fall, IDC predicted that worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be more than $40 billion in 2012 and is expected to approach $100 billion in 2016.
As far as offering IT services, telcos can stand out in areas such as cloud orchestration and enabling multi-vendor integration, IDC officials said.
“This might translate to operators helping companies to integrate all the different unified communications and collaboration tools to work together across the organization,” according to Adrian Dominic Ho, principal analyst of telecom and managed services at IDC Asia-Pacific.
Cloud is not only paving the way for telcos to succeed in the New Year, it’s also turning out to be a good opportunity for investors based on current and predicted adoption trends, TMCnet recently reported.
Given the many cloud business opportunities on the market today – including small cloud service providers – they are bringing new benefits to their own companies as well as to their investors.
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