As savvy businesses and enterprises embark on the New Year, it’s certain a top priority will be to re-examine how existing telecom industry trends can help streamline communications and boost efficiency.

One company in particular, tw telecom (News - Alert), stands by its ability to think ahead and take businesses to where they need to be in the future. The business Ethernet leader successfully does this by delivering next-generation, scalable solutions to meet ever-changing business needs and manage the applications required most by today’s enterprise businesses.

Additionally, as one of the three top business Ethernet providers in the U.S., tw telecom has successfully connected more commercial buildings to its fiber network than any other communications provider in the market. Thanks to its robust metro fiber networks and ownership of one of the 10 most interconnected IP backbones globally, tw telecom is capable of supporting mission-critical enterprise applications and delivering high-quality customer experiences and improved business productivity.

As tw telecom heads into 2012, its own senior vice president of Business Development of Strategy, Michael Rouleau, recently expounded upon some of the trends and how tw telecom is positioned to meet customer requirements in the approaching year.

According to Rouleau, convergence – or the process of voice, data and Internet access being delivered to a business all over a single network connection – is expected to make waves in the telecommunications market in 2012, and even 2013. Accordingly, tw telecom offers converged services as a managed service so that it is “highly compatible” with the customer’s current system.

"Convergence (News - Alert) delivers the business customer real value. By combining voice, internal data like MPLS and Internet access over a single network, the enterprise customer eliminates redundant network access which results in a reduced network spend, saving the business money,” Rouleau said.

Come 2012, tw telecom will unveil the second phase of its Intelligent Network, the company’s latest project designed to give customers more control of their networks and IT expenditures by more cost-effectively and efficiently delivering new applications at a more rapid pace. According to Rouleau, the solution for doing so is in the cloud, which is why the first stage of the Intelligent Network initiative, Enhanced Management, focused primarily on granting customers more visibility into their network performance via tw telecom’s MyPortal.

Giving a bit of a preview into Intelligent Network’s second stage – called Dynamic Capacity – Rouleau said it will give customers the ability to scale their bandwidth, on demand, through the tw telecom portal.

“What’s compelling about Dynamic Capacity is that customers don’t have to pre-provision or have resources sitting idle,” Rouleau said. “They have access to bandwidth as they need it and can scale it up or down based on their business needs without having to wait 30, 45 or 60 days, as they might have to with another provider.”

The Intelligent Network will come into play for Rouleau’s next trend prediction: big data, a term describing incrementally larger amounts of data, and the ability to retrieve it and use it more rapidly in analysis.

“With the Intelligent Network, we’re actually helping customers move away from the ‘big dump pipes,’ which give them a lot of bandwidth but may often sit idle, thus costing extra money,” Rouleau explained.  This solution is a more efficient network that gives them just what they need when they need it.”

The last trend, according to Rouleau, will focus largely on new methods of networking.

“In this new world — where applications reside outside of the realm of control of the CIO, in a third-party data center or hosted by another provider — they lose that control,” added Rouleau. “So we’ve been focused on how we can deliver to the customer a secure, scalable, predictable network experience in the cloud or third-party data center that’s just like having everything in house.”

2012 is certainly looking to be an exciting time for information technology, which is why tw telecom is kicking off the year by attending the 2012 Pacific Telecommunications Council (News - Alert) Conference taking place Jan. 15 to 18 in Honolulu, Hawaii. At the event, industry leaders and experts – including Rouleau – will discuss and illustrate the many ways global networks, and mobile devices, can support breakthrough applications that give way to entirely new industries.

Rouleau will serve as a panelist during the Cloud and Enterprise Services breakout session being held 3:45 to 5:15 p.m., on Monday, Jan. 16. tw telecom will also be onsite at booth No. 23 to display its products and services portfolio and network with attendees.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves