Master Agent Featured Articles

Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) has been conducting several research studies in Brazil that include such topics as an analysis of the Brazilian cloud computing market, IT spending trends and an analysis of the Brazilian total telecommunications services market. This week, the company released its insight in a customer research study titled “Strategic Analysis of the Brazilian Companies Investments in ICT.” This report is part of the IT Services Growth Partnership Service program. 

Frost & Sullivan is a global growth consulting firm which provides market research and analysis, growth strategy consulting, and corporate training services across multiple industries including automotive, healthcare, Internet and communication technology (ICT), and many others.

The ICT report consisted of interviews with members of 313 enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs) in an attempt to better understand the companies’ interest in a variety of ICT solutions and how they are currently being adopted for use.

The expectations from Frost & Sullivan are that ultra-broadband services and enterprise mobility applications will be the driving force behind telecommunications spending in Brazil. For now, we can expect to see traditional voice services becoming commoditized with companies migrating to Internet protocol (IP) telephony in an attempt to reduce costs.

Frost & Sullivan’s ICT Research Analyst, Carina Goncalves, said “In Brazil, it is important for SMBs to have a fixed telephony line to build credibility with customers and foster financial relationships with banks and suppliers. For this reason as well as the availability of bundles that combine mobile enterprise solutions, infrastructure-as-a-service, tablets and point-of-sale solutions, the fixed telephony market is still a lucrative segment."

Larger enterprises are taking a different approach. Of the 313 companies interviewed, about 50 percent said that they have made their internally used Wi-Fi available for customer use as well. It is because of this that telecommunication providers will need to bundle Internet services with other ICT products.

As Goncalves mentioned, some SMBs rely on broadband, since it is currently more affordable and some providers are enhancing the quality of these services. However, they will still need to rely on fiber and dedicated Internet connections to maintain robust adoption rates in Brazil.

A breakdown of the report shows that just slightly more than half of the companies from the corporate and SMB segments are using voice over IP (VoIP)/IP private branch exchange (PBX (News - Alert)). Of the remaining group, only about 20.8 percent said that they are not currently employing VoIP/IP PBX but would incorporate it as a means of reducing telecommunications costs.

Not surprising is the fact that of all the enterprise mobility applications, corporate email is the most widely used. The report also revealed that about 83.7 percent of Brazilian companies have subscriptions to electronic security and monitoring services, while also relying on mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) connections for both primary connection and backup purposes.

In the report, Goncalves also made reference to the fact that "As fierce competition pervades the Brazilian ICT market, operators are providing unlimited voice plans for on-net calls and aggressive discounts for off-net calls to retain clients. To survive in this new environment, value-added services act as crucial differentiators and reinforce the need for consolidation in the telecommunications market."