Asia Pacific Managed and Hosted Communications Services Market 2007

Enterprises in Asia Pacific Seek Advanced Communications to Support Their Businesses, Thereby Enhancing and Evolving Enterprise Communications

The burgeoning penetration and availability of Internet protocol (IP) telephony, corporate e-mail, calendaring systems, multimedia conferencing, and mobility solutions have transformed the enterprise communications landscape in the last few years. Enterprises are seeking advanced communications to support their rapidly growing businesses in the Asia Pacific region. On one hand, the growing variety of communications channels is facilitating better collaboration, and on the other hand, there are potential challenges in the management of the entire complex communications infrastructure and rise in bandwidth requirements. Several global as well as regional telecom operators have gradually built a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise communications services, beyond simple telephony and are migrating to IP multimedia applications. Migration toward IP communications has been underway in Asia Pacific for the past few years with 56.0 percent of the total spending on enterprise telephony on IP solutions in 2007, says the analyst of this research. IP systems have good growth prospects with the possibility of integrating additional communications applications with the current IP platforms, such as collaboration, presence, unified messaging, and mobility. With the rising number of mobile employees and remote branch locations, many companies are facing increasing requirements for better collaboration and mobility with both internal and external parties. Though the core of enterprise communications in most companies in Asia Pacific is e-mail and telephony, there is also an emergent usage of conferencing, collaboration solutions, and mobility. Furthermore, there is an upward trend in the use of unified communications (UC), which is the integration of desktop and telephony communications, to arrive at an integrated infrastructure for communications and collaboration.

Unified Communications Push Enterprises to Have a Potentially Complex Communication Infrastructure

In the near future, growth is likely to be driven by sophisticated enterprise communications requirements from organizations with multiple office locations and a significant number of mobile workers. Eventually, with the advent of UC, enterprises are expected to have a much more potentially complex communications infrastructure. Most companies would require extensive expertise from service providers to help them plan, implement, and manage the infrastructure to ensure reliable real-time UC. Telecom service providers have traditionally focused on providing carriage services with limited traction in the provision of additional IP applications and managed services for their enterprise customers. Although some of the regional and global telecom service providers have attempted to offer communications services, such as managed telephony, hosted e-mail, and enterprise mobility applications, most have experienced limited success due to an incomprehensive portfolio and strategy to target the market. However, a sound telecom provider strategy is likely to involve significant planning, innovations in new business models, and potential investments in new technology and sales expertise to achieve the best possible results, explains the analyst. Successful telecom carriers are those that have demonstrated commitment, flexibility in driving organizational changes, and understand their customers' businesses. Telecom carriers that already have a strong information technology (IT) practice or have existing partnerships with the major IT service companies and communications technology vendors are expected to be able to swiftly roll out a set of integrated and unified managed and hosted communications services in the market. With the growing attention on unified communications (UC) in the enterprise market, it is important for the telecom service providers to realize that there exists a valuable emerging opportunity to transform themselves to an end-to-end provider of enterprise communications, concludes the analyst. To succeed in the provision of an end-to-end managed UC offering, telecom carriers would need to have the necessary technology expertise, business model, and operational processes, tailored for a smooth strategy execution.

Market Sectors

Expert Frost & Sullivan analysts thoroughly examine the following market sectors in this research:

Managed and hosted communications services:

• Managed and hosted telephony
• Messaging
• Conferencing