February 19, 2009
ABI Research: Managed Services to Experience Huge Growth Period
By Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor
Although managed services for mobile networks secured close to $19 billion in revenues for 2008, ABI Research feels that there is still a lot of untapped market in this field. The company states that as Europe leads the adoption of managed services, Tier One operators in this region are opting for managed services for profitability.
As the cost of running a business increases and profits decrease, many companies in the telecom sector are looking at managed services to reduce overheads. Apart from this, managed services can also be used to tackle increasing customer demands.
The demand for telecom services is still on the rise in emerging markets such as India and the concept of managed services is highly relevant in these countries. While IBM (News - Alert) leads in managed IT services for mobile operators, Ericsson currently leads worldwide in network-related managed services. ABI feels that companies such as Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) and Alcatel-Lucent are the ones to watch out for in the future.
“Telecom operators’ overheads are astronomical, especially in the United States,” says Senior Analyst Nadine Manjaro. “North America accounts for less than 10 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers, but has the world’s highest operating expense tally. Europe and Asia Pacific follow a distant second and third. There’s a huge opportunity for managed services companies to offer savings to these operators.”
The research states that European operators such as Orange in Switzerland and 3 in the UK get annual savings averaging 30 percent by using managed services. Other companies such as Sprint (News - Alert) are also shifting to managed services, as the company recently announced that it will shift 5,000-10,000 employees to managed services.
Recently, the company conducted a study on residential gateways where it projected that intelligent broadband gateways are likely to generate double-digit annual growth results over the six-year forecast period ending in 2013. Entitled, “Global Residential Gateways,” the ABI Research (News - Alert) study analyzes the changing nature of gateway activities around the globe.
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Fixed Service Strategies for Mobile Network Operators, brought to you by Comverse (News - Alert).
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Michelle Robart
