Digital Lifescapes

Around the world, many telecom service providers are in a state of transition, as their traditional voice and data communications service growth opportunities are either limited or in a decline. Meanwhile, the need to pursue new revenue opportunities has often been restricted by a historically slow moving organization and underlying infrastructure constraints that essentially made them inflexible to address the need to change. Therefore, during 2015, selective organizational restructuring and fundamental infrastructure transitions will be implemented to enable these telecom service providers to adapt more effectively to the apparent new opportunities in the marketplace. Much of the change will be driven by the deployment of new software, systems and related professional services from vendors with domain experience in managing these business model transitions. Adoption of next-generation technologies by telecom service providers has led to worldwide growth in the Operation Suppo...

Based on the findings from a recent survey, IDC forecasts that open source software and related services will continue to expand in importance to end-user organizations. Additionally, almost 60 percent of the survey respondents said their company's spending on open source increased in 2007, in terms of relative percentage of IT spending. Quality assurance, testing, and certification of open source systems was rated as the fastest-growing services opportunity by respondents, who projected their spending on this service would grow 150 percent between 2007 and 2008. "The economic slowdown in the United States may actually boost demand for open source services," said Gard Little, program manager, IDC's Worldwide Services and Emerging Services Opportunities research programs. "If organizations adopt more open source software as part of a strategy to reduce software costs, the demand for related services should increase." IDC predicts more pure service providers w...

The global market for operations support systems (OSS) -- the computing and software IT infrastructure that performs engineering, provisioning, and management functions in telecommunications networks -- will exceed $46 billion in 2008, according to the study by Insight Research. Telecommunications industry spending for OSS platforms is expected to lag only slightly the forecast growth in service revenue over the next five years, indicating that the industry is fully expecting sustainable growth in the years ahead. According to their report entitled "Operations Support Systems, 2007-2012," telecom network operators worldwide are forecast to increase their investment in OSS platforms at a compounded rate of just over eight percent over the next five years. North American investment in the computing and software systems used to acquire, serve, and bill customers will lag worldwide investment, growing at a compounded rate of nearly six percent over the same period, while OSS expe...

Broadband service providers (BSP) that deploy product data management systems to create telco "service factories" will have a better chance of surviving in a next-generation services environment that will feature tens of thousands of unique services, according to the latest market study by Light Reading. Their report details and analyzes the effects that product data management systems will have on the delivery of next-generation telco services. It explores and outlines how network operators are likely to implement product data management systems (PDMSs), and how the PDMS is likely to be integrated into larger frameworks -- such as service delivery platforms (SDPs) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives. "PDMS is emerging as a linchpin application that network operators can deploy to create a kind of automated telco service factory where customers can configure products with the features they want, much as they can customize a computer order online today,...

The rapidly growing Service Delivery Platform (SDP) market, including software and integration services, is forecast to reach $3.5 billion in 2010, according to a new report from Infonetics Research. A growing number of mobile and fixed-line operators are deploying SDPs or incremental services based on existing SDPs to remain competitive with facilities-based competitors, and to stave off competition from Web-based application providers like Google and Yahoo, the report states. Offering new media-rich bundled services like IPTV, video on demand (VoD), video telephony, and fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is the only way to thrive in the competitive communications environment. All these new services will require significant capex and opex for new hardware components and their integration into existing signaling, OSS, and BSS networks. The solution? According to Infonetics, it's an investment in service delivery platform software and associated integration services. "Getting new...

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies from the IT world is already having a significant impact on the way that telecom service providers are planning their next-generation service strategies, leading some telcos to rethink the role that IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) will play in next-generation service creation, according to the latest report from Light Reading. "Content providers are emerging as a serious rival to network operators in the next-generation services arena, and they are working to develop competitive services using completely different approaches than those slowly making inroads in the telecom sector," says Caroline Chappell, research analyst with Light Reading's Services Software Insider and author of the report. "Increasingly, the Internet world is becoming a source of over-the-top digital content services using Web 2.0 technologies that have nothing to do with telco standards such as IMS and SIP." If telcos resist incorporating Web 2.0 designs ...

The market for standalone open source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage, according to a new study from IDC. Adoption of OSS will accelerate over the forecast period of 2007 through 2011, as barriers to adoption get knocked down. Growth in revenue, however, will lag behind the growth in distribution of open source software. "We are in the early stages of the development and deployment of OSS," said Matt Lawton, program director of IDC's Open Source Software Business Models research program. "The market is still quite immature, especially now that we see active open source projects in all layers of the software stack. Although we see healthy growth in revenue from standalone open source software, we must keep in mind that revenue will substantially lag behind the distribution of open source software." Many distributions of standalone open source software are free, while paid distributions typically are based on pay-as-you-go subscriptions rather than...