According to Ovum, incumbents in the Asia-Pacific region had a dismal year in 2009. Factors such as price drops, market saturation and challenging macroeconomic conditions all contributed towards a decline in average revenues. Regional telcos saw an average decline of 0.8% in top-line revenues across the region. Even with the global economy recovery, analysts predict that incumbents will still have a relatively tough future ahead.
Service providers, like all other businesses, have to respond rapidly to the changes in their business environment. In addition, service providers can leverage their existing relationships. They also have significant network and related technology investments such as billing and back-office systems.
With the connected world so deeply enmeshed in how business users get things done, customers are no longer in a position to give up their mobile telephone or home broadband services. Thus, the basis of business today is about evolving it such that it embraces innovation, brings services into existence very quickly, and looks at ways to monetize them.
Service providers need to innovate and partner to maximize opportunities so as to deliver the unique and highly personalized services that consumers want. In order to do so, partnership helps speed up the telco’s ability to deliver a broad set of enterprise-ready products and services. Microsoft, for example, is rooted in partnerships with Chunghwa Telecom, Telstra, SingTel, Reliance Globalcom, and we believe that new forms of partnerships are critical to succeed in the digital age.
Partnerships across the entire value chain are going to be critical for the next generation of innovation. Microsoft is uniquely equipped to partner with service providers and help them move up the stack. For example, on the consumer front, we have Windows Live Messenger, Xbox, Windows 7, and the upcoming Windows Phone 7; on the business front, we have Windows Azure and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, just to name a few. Above all, service providers can leverage a part of Microsoft’s core strategy of providing their partner communities with access to multiple resources that help them build and grow their business.
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