Latin American telecom market is muy caliente

Call centers, telepresence systems drive demand for IP bandwidth

Orange Business Services has doubled the capacity of its IP network in Latin America to 2.5 gigabits/sec. to meet increasing customer demand in the region.  

Orange Business executives say the demand -- which they describe as "very, very strong" -- is coming from the off-shoring of call centers from Spain as well as a push to use telepresence systems instead of travel.

"Latin America is a region where it's expensive to travel," explained Arnaud Messager, director of business development for Orange Business Services. "Multinationals also are looking for a greener image, so when we sell them our IP solutions those are the kinds of things we see."

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Orange Business Services has doubled the capacity of its IP network in Latin America to 2.5 gigabits/sec. to meet increasing customer demand in the region.  

Orange Business executives say the demand -- which they describe as "very, very strong" -- is coming from the off-shoring of call centers from Spain as well as a push to use telepresence systems instead of travel.

"Latin America is a region where it's expensive to travel," explained Arnaud Messager, director of business development for Orange Business Services. "Multinationals also are looking for a greener image, so when we sell them our IP solutions those are the kinds of things we see."

Orange Business now has more than 160 points of presence in 31 Latin American countries. The company has 480 corporate customers in the region, including Cargill, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Belcorp.

Messager says the Latin American market continues to grow despite the global economic downturn, as more companies migrate from hub-and-spoke private line network to more robust MPLS services.

"Latin America is definitely a growing region compared to what we're seeing in North America or Europe," Messager says. He added that the demand is coming from American and European multinationals as well as companies with headquarters in the region.

The network upgrade -- which involved swapping out Cisco 7500 Series Routers with ESR 10000s or 7600 Routers -- was planned prior to the economic crisis.  

"We have a longer-term network plan…The downturn doesn't prevent us from making these kinds of investments," Messager says.

Orange Business is offering several new services across the backbone, including telepresence, multicast and an application performance enhancement service dubbed Network Boost.

"Enterprises need to optimize bandwidth as much as possible, and Network Boost is designed to address that need," Messager says. "It includes application-level SLAs and traffic acceleration."

Orange Business says it's cautiously optimistic for its 2009 traffic projections.

"We see strong demand right now in the Americas in general," Messager says. "In our business, we talk about a compelling event that causes businesses to change the way they want to manage their IP infrastructure. We think the economic situation is a compelling event. It's causing us to have a real dialogue with customers about how best to manage their IP networks."

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