All in all, a pretty good scorecard
For our next two editions, we’ll look back to our newsletters from December 2009 and see how we fared when we made our annual predictions for this year. Today, we’ll look back at part one of the 2010 predictions we had advanced following conversations and advice from industry experts.
Following a trend we first correctly predicted for 2009, last year we expected to see more hosted applications offered to the SMB market in 2010. Looking back over the last 12 months, we have definitely seen an uptick in hosted services for the SMB, along with “cloud-based” offerings and “software as a service” (SaaS) targeting the businesses of all sizes. Perhaps “hosted, cloud-based, and SaaS” have become interchangeable marketing terms in 2010 but regardless of what they are called, these services’ collective popularity increased in 2010 as businesses balanced the need to keep IT infrastructures up-to-date without making substantial infrastructure investments.
Last year Paul McMillan, director of UC technical vision and strategy, Office of the CTO at Siemens Enterprise Communications, shared his own 2010 predictions including thoughts on how UC will be affected by social networking, mobility applications and video to the desktop. McMillan was dead-on with his predictions as each of these has not only had an effect on network infrastructures; in our view all social networking, mobile apps, and desktop video have actually begun to bring changes to business process.
In other predictions made last year, some had suggested that DOCSIS 3.0 high speed broadband technology deployed by cable operators would change the competition environment for enterprise broadband services. While we can’t verify which individual products in cable company portfolios are responsible, we know that Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox have all hit the billion-dollar mark in 2010 for annualized business service revenues. We also note that telcos have become much more focused in improved service portfolios for the SMB market: Verizon has been aggressive with FiOS bundles while AT&T has made noticeable progress with mobile applications, with many of these mobile apps well suited for the SMB.
We’ll continue next time with a retrospective look at our 2010 predictions, and then we’ll get out the crystal ball to see what 2011 might bring.
