Pyramid Research analysis, NTT Hits Light-Speed -- "NTT East, NTT West, and NTT Communications recently announced plans to spend an estimated JPY800bn (US$7.4bn) over the next five years to create the world's largest fiber optic network. Specifically, the NTT companies will upgrade 30m connections nationwide to fiber thereby allowing them to offer a wider array of value-added services on top of traditional voice. As Japan analyst Jane Buenaventura states, the justification for this expense is simple: survival in the increasingly competitive Japanese broadband market."
Every product roadmap conversation with a technology vendor now runs through one filter that has nothing to do with the roadmap itself: does the company have an AI story that a buyer's finance team would actually underwrite. Forrester Research just gave that gut check a formal structure. Its newly introduced AI Disruption Model evaluates 17 technology and service categories, spanning more than 200 individual markets, against nine factors including AI substitutability, labor intensity, and switching costs. The finding that should reorder tech vendor strategy conversations this quarter is not which markets grow. It is how few of them do, and what that scarcity means for everyone else. Only Three Categories Get an Unambiguous Green Light According to the research, infrastructure providers such as cloud platforms, data centers, and storage; data and AI providers spanning models, platforms, and governance tooling; and cybersecurity and identity providers covering zero trust and AI agent...