According to the latest Industry Survey: Transformative Technology Adoption and Attitudes – Implementers' Perspective of Telco and Cloud report from ABI Research, despite telecom operators' efforts to enter new enterprise markets and create new business opportunities, the B2B technology survey indicates that technology implementers predominantly see telcos as providers of connectivity, and not value-added, vertical specific services.
The ABI survey finds that 55% of implementer respondents expect to use telcos for connectivity alone, with 31% favouring a 'connectivity+' approach, presenting an opportunity for telcos to bundle value-added, vertical-specific services with connectivity. However, only 13% of survey respondents expect telcos to create new ecosystems for IoT, data-related, IT and cloud services.
ABI noted that connectivity+ involves bundling vertical-specific services on top of connectivity, allowing telcos to leverage existing assets such as data, devices management, applications and services management, security and analytics to add value for implementers.
The research firm stated that the survey also indicate that telcos cannot, and should not, attempt to compete with web-scale companies in cloud computing services.
Specifically, ABI finds that only 4% of implementers surveyed intend to utilise telcos for cloud computing services currently, and projects that this will decline to 1% over the next five years. However, the survey shows that 12% of respondents are currently using hybrid cloud, and forecasts that this will increase to 38% in the next five years as the industry recognises the growing importance of using more than private and public cloud services on a standalone basis.Commenting on the survey, Dimitris Mavrakis, research director at ABI Research, said, "Verizon has done well to offload its cloud businesses and other Tier 1 telcos will follow… competing with web-scale companies in their own field is impossible for telcos… implementer requirements and telco strategies seem to be disparate for the moment, for example, telcos are focusing on the automotive vertical, but the survey indicates that the retail, government and logistics markets are very interested in telco services".
