Where's the Blue Ocean?

In the book, Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne explain that a Red Ocean is a hypercompetitive market. In telecom, that would be the consumer triple play and cellular phones. The Integrated T1 is sold by numerous CLECs with very little differentiation. The same is coming from the SIP Trunk. Selling on price on makes the ocean red – along with balance sheets.

Where’s the Blue Ocean? Today, in telecom, that would be in niches like colocation, conferencing, electricity/power, and SaaS (News - Alert). There aren’t many people selling these services, which leaves the door open for someone to become an expert. (Granted, there are experts in the field, like Chris Palermo’s agency, GCN, that specializes in colocation projects).

As well as you know voice now, you will need to comprehend data. Everything is going IP and voice will just be another application running on the pipe. We are already seeing cloud-based services, like IVR from Ifbyphone (News - Alert) and others, that used to be strictly on-premises (and expensive) hardware solutions, now available on-demand from the SaaS vendors.

The other Blue Ocean is business continuity design. We have been witness, this year, to data centers having outages, even from the mighty Amazon and Google (News - Alert). Fiber cuts are taking out whole sections of cities. As more services and data move to the cloud, redundancy will need to be designed and maintained, not by the carrier but by the customer. A multi-homing approach to backbone and data centers will be essential to mission critical data systems. Backup plans will need to be in place.

The final blue sea is security. Again, with more and more services moving to the cloud, data integrity and security will be paramount. This week, Twitter had over 300 documents stolen, including high-level internal discussion notes that were published on Techcrunch. This is not an uncommon occurrence. According to Verizon Business (News - Alert)’ 2009 breach report, “Last year, 295 million records were compromised and there were 90 confirmed breaches.”

While it many be bloody red in some sectors of the telecom ocean, there are plenty of areas to become a niche expert and reign in a Blue Ocean. IT

Peter Radizeski is head of RAD-INFO (News - Alert), Inc., a consulting agency specializing in the telecom industry.

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