January/February 2001

BY LAURA GUEVIN

Add standard Internet access and messaging equipment to the overcrowded closet (and good luck trying to get it to interoperate with your phone system) and you've got a stack of black boxes that may or may not work together, and may or may not grow with your business as you add new employees and require new services. Of course, you could buy all your communications equipment from one vendor for a hefty price, but plan on being married to that vendor for a very long time -- your investment guarantees you'll be spending so much time in the closet that you may want to consider an addition. But there is an alternative.

Imagine a world where enterprise PBXs and telephony equipment were no longer hidden in the closet. In fact, there would be no equipment closet (okay, maybe a small shelf for premise equipment like integrated access devices [IADs], but that's it). Welcome to the world of hosted communication services, a dynamic new marketplace we plan to explore and share throughout the pages of Communications ASP. The goal of hosted communications is to place the burden of infrastructure maintenance and service delivery in the hands of qualified carriers and service providers -- and away from busy business owners who are already overworked and overspending just to maintain their communication systems.

Application service providers (ASPs) have the equipment and expertise to offer you an entire communications system based on the services and scalability you need -- effectively kicking the PBX out of the closet and into the network cloud. Why spend money on ugly black boxes that have to be hidden away in a closet when you could be paying for sexy enhanced services like unified communications, voice over IP (VoIP), and multimedia conferencing? And does it matter if your phone calls and faxes are routed in circuit or packet-switched format as long as you receive a guaranteed level of service? That is what's important to most customers, the package of value-added services they can utilize, not how those services are delivered from the central office to the customer premise, or from the central office to the cloud for that matter.

COMMUNICATIONS IN THE CLOUD
Communications ASP is written for telcos, all flavors of carriers including competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), building LECs (BLECs), and data LECs (DLECs), and all types of service providers. We believe the new generation of communications providers has the power to change the way telephony and data services are delivered -- from the cloud to the closet-free enterprise, from legacy Centrex to IP Centrex, and forward to the next generation of Centrex-style services that offer the basics and so much more. After all, isn't it the role of the next-gen service provider to define a niche for this new breed of services that separates them from the limitations of traditional offerings?

This publication will be focused on the burgeoning market for enhanced services that can be delivered on a hosted basis, and the equipment and network infrastructure required to deliver valuable services like presence-based messaging, voice-enabled Web sites, and even entire hosted communication systems. We will also discuss the importance of partnerships in the new hosted space, as the business-to-business delivery model becomes just as important as the business-to-consumer model. In fact, many of the carriers and service providers covered in Communications ASP will be delivering their products and solutions to other services providers or resellers and distributors, who will then tailor those solutions for enterprise and consumer end-user marketplaces. It's up to the service providers to realize the value of hiding bulky service hardware and infrastructure in the network cloud, while flaunting service solutions to partners and customers.

The value proposition for hosted services has certainly come out of the closet. In fact, Dataquest says the market for hosted services will grow to $9.3 billion by 2004. The model obviously benefits service providers as well, since they don't have to invest their time and resources on infrastructure and personnel to maintain an extensive network and data center. In fact, most ASPs co-locate their servers in a large data facility where they will be guaranteed the bandwidth and service levels to accommodate their customers, leaving them to focus on their core competencies of serving up enhanced services in an efficient clustered server environment. And today's data centers are equipped with the security and network management resources to eliminate the top concerns of most enterprise customers: Service level agreements (SLAs) and privacy/security.

Coming out of the equipment closet may seem like a big step -- for carriers and service providers as well as enterprise customers. But hosted communications make sense on a number of levels, from lower implementation and maintenance costs to scalability and flexibility in adding new services. We hope that you will enjoy reading about the latest services and equipment available for hosted solutions. Communications ASP will strive to stay on top of the market as communications services make their debut outside the closet and in the next-gen network cloud.

[ Return To The January/February 2001 Table Of Contents ]