MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: According to Ovum, SMEs in India are highly price sensitive, less exposed to the global market, and confident about spending in the current economic climate. They are keen to move to managed services, although reluctant to increase the proportion of expenditure on mobile services.
India has a broad diversity of suppliers and is a highly competitive market place. There is no single dominant player across the country for telecommunication services and the competition is greater than in most of the Asian markets. The number of options for mobile service is greater than on the fixed services.
“As a result, in order to get the best of breed, the majority of SMEs prefers not to have single provider for multiple services”, says Claudio Castelli, Senior Analyst at Ovum and author of this report. “The common strategy of bundling services, deployed by service providers in many other places, is less likely to be effective in this market,”
SMEs in India are looking at ways of reducing unnecessary up-front capital investment. Castelli adds, “Seventy one percent of the companies surveyed prefer to have a predictable monthly recurring charge per user for telecoms equipment and services.”
The high interest in opex-based models for telecoms equipment and services in this market is reflected in the SMEs mature views on managed services. A few SMEs are already using managed services and many others are planning to do so in the future.
“They are most keen to adopt managed audio/video conferencing, PBX/IP PBX, security and specialist business software applications”, says Claudio, based in Melbourne.
In addition, the share of mobile workers is growing; 43 percent of SMEs' employees have some degree of mobility. “However this isn’t reflected in the budget allocated for mobile services”, says Claudio. “Unsurprisingly, controlling the cost of mobility is a high priority amongst the SMEs.”
Like in many other Asian countries, the majority of the companies does not provide wireless devices to employees needing mobility for business purposes. This is a clear indication that users are generally providing and supporting their own personal mobile devices when at work.
Ovum believes this practice is dangerous and might result in business risks. For example, if a salesperson goes to a competitor, their customers will continue to contact him at that number.
Overall, players taking the managed services path will have higher chances to succeed with SMEs in this market. At Ovum, we expect the software as a service (SaaS) approach to be a good opportunity for services providers and solution vendors.
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Cogs in the wheel
In engineering, it is imperative that all cogs of the wheel come together, so that the wheel rolls smoothly. Similarly, it is imperative that all key IT processes in an organization gel together and work as one.
Imagine the nightmare that enterprises, small and large, would have to go through should this did not happen!
The first basic IT asset is your company's network, or the intranet. We have seen several times that a company's network's down for some reason and mails can't be sent or received.
In such cases, the organizations or the enterprises who are 'stuck' with this situation, are literally crippled. Mails can't be received, mails can't be sent out, important mails are missed, business-critical processes are waylaid, and so on and so forth. I've been part of this nightmare several times.
Once, the undersea cable snapped during my stay in a company. I don't need to add the problem we had to face for at least half a day, as service providers worked furiously to rectify the cable and restore normal service.
Some advocate satellite as the best medium for managing data transmission. Maybe! Some others cite wireless. Perhaps!! Then, I hear from many that there are issues related with security and storage. However, those would only come into play once your basic network is operational smoothly.
In telecom, they have something called five nines, or 99.9999, which means the network is up and running for this percentage of time! You've noticed how people go beserk and start cursing their phones or the network, should they fail to receive a network, or are unable to connect to the network!
What they don't know or realize is the hard work that's involved in setting up, maintaining and operating a network! It's similar to what sometimes happens in offices when the network breaks down and we are unable to send/receive mails.
Maybe, it would be prudent to first manage the internal network as best as possible, before moving on to bigger, better things. The cogs in the wheel got to move smoothly.
Imagine the nightmare that enterprises, small and large, would have to go through should this did not happen!
The first basic IT asset is your company's network, or the intranet. We have seen several times that a company's network's down for some reason and mails can't be sent or received.
In such cases, the organizations or the enterprises who are 'stuck' with this situation, are literally crippled. Mails can't be received, mails can't be sent out, important mails are missed, business-critical processes are waylaid, and so on and so forth. I've been part of this nightmare several times.
Once, the undersea cable snapped during my stay in a company. I don't need to add the problem we had to face for at least half a day, as service providers worked furiously to rectify the cable and restore normal service.
Some advocate satellite as the best medium for managing data transmission. Maybe! Some others cite wireless. Perhaps!! Then, I hear from many that there are issues related with security and storage. However, those would only come into play once your basic network is operational smoothly.
In telecom, they have something called five nines, or 99.9999, which means the network is up and running for this percentage of time! You've noticed how people go beserk and start cursing their phones or the network, should they fail to receive a network, or are unable to connect to the network!
What they don't know or realize is the hard work that's involved in setting up, maintaining and operating a network! It's similar to what sometimes happens in offices when the network breaks down and we are unable to send/receive mails.
Maybe, it would be prudent to first manage the internal network as best as possible, before moving on to bigger, better things. The cogs in the wheel got to move smoothly.
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