* A look back at how accurate our crystal ball was last year
How did we do a year ago with our 2007 predictions? For starters, we missed the mark with our market consolidation prediction, but were accurate on foreseeing the growing importance of IP contact centers to service providers. Let’s delve deeper into our ’07 predictions and see if our crystal ball needs to be replaced before we make our predictions for 2008.
We missed the mark when we predicted further consolidation among major IP services and equipment because we saw a reduction in 2007 big-player mergers compared to 2006, although we did see some smaller business acquisitions and lots of inter-company cooperation that perhaps are laying the groundwork for further M&A activity in 2008.
We accurately suggested that the IP contact center would be increasingly important to service providers (especially toward small and midsize businesses) and we saw progress as service providers added integrated IP services, such as VoIP and Internet access with their metro Ethernet services.
Fixed-mobile convergence did benefit from the 2005-2006 build out of mobile data networks, and the hoped-for enterprise services were successfully built out in Asia and Europe, although the United States still has a long way to go.
On the consumer side, we hit the mark when predicting that cable companies would see little traction as a third-party mobile voice supplier, but we admit that Comcast and Time Warner Cable surprised us by beating out Vonage so quickly to become the U.S. VoIP market share leader.
Perhaps we expected too much when we suggested ‘Net neutrality would be “legislated” in 2007; it seems the U.S. Congress had other more important things to do last year.
As we predicted, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) interoperability and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) deployments progressed slowly, and as we also suggested professional services (and managed services) have become increasingly important to the enterprise deployments of advanced features and office IP-applications integration.
Finally, the crystal ball was “good enough” when showing a year ago that Microsoft would be more widely seen by the enterprise as a credible alternative to traditional VoIP suppliers, although we wish the crystal ball would have been a little clearer about the important role Microsoft would play with unified communications.
Next time we’ll look forward to what we expect in 2008. Best wishes to all for a happy and successful New Year.
