What's up for the cloud, regulation, VoIP and more
Picking up where we left off as we closed last year with part one of our 2011 predictions, today we’ll continue our discussion, outlining what we expect to happen this year with hosted/cloud services, net neutrality, VoIP evolution, and consolidation trends.
Starting with our take on the FCC net neutrality ruling last month we note that few interested parties (if any) seemed to like everything about the new regulation. So our 2011 prediction about the ruling’s affect: The final outcome will be years in the making as stakeholders lobby, legislate, and litigate about if or how access to the Internet should be regulated. In other words, the real battle for net neutrality will just be getting started in 2011.
As for VoIP evolution, we expect to see more of the same when it comes to the VoIP deployments with one twist. In 2010, demand for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based services like SIP trunking grew, and we expect to see this trend continue. But we also expect to see a wider acceptance of SIP services in the small business market as the SME business case for SIP features becomes better understood and as carrier competition for SIP network services and support becomes more transparent.
Similarly, we expect hosted and cloud based services (including software as a service) to continue their growth in the large enterprise market, extending their usefulness to the small business and medium enterprise tier.
Finally, our take on continuing consolidation. Last year turned out to be a banner year for consolidation among CLECS, and we expect to see the trend continue in 2011. Of course, the no-brainer 2011 prediction is for CenturyLink to complete its acquisition of Qwest; however, we’d be surprised to see any other 2011 merger and acquisition (M&A) activity this big among service providers — if we don’t count Comcast’s likely 2011 takeover of NBC Universal as one service provider gobbling up another. The picture for big-time M&A among equipment suppliers is less clear, although we expect that larger companies will continue to pick of smaller suppliers to help round out evolving portfolios.
Next time: we’ll report in from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) being held this week in Las Vegas.
