The good folks at the Yankee Group have come up with a vision of “the Anywhere Network” — which they describe as a seamless and always intelligent infrastructure for providing a connection for everyone to everything from anywhere. Their thesis is that the online world destroys traditional value chains and ecosystems, forcing a whole slew of players to reinvent themselves and their business models.
The good folks at the Yankee Group have come up with a vision of “the Anywhere Network” — which they describe as a seamless and always intelligent infrastructure for providing a connection for everyone to everything from anywhere. Their thesis is that the online world destroys traditional value chains and ecosystems, forcing a whole slew of players to reinvent themselves and their business models.
While the pitch is something of a rehash of 1990s dot-com thinking, the anywhere-connectivity concept is dead-on. In Nemertes’ recent benchmark on the virtual workplace (May 2007), a key finding is that the typical user — not just your high-powered salesperson or delivery trucker — is now going mobile.
And that has profound implications for carriers. The network’s endpoint is no longer a device (whether router or desktop inside a carefully defended perimeter). It’s the user — who could be working from home, a hotel room or a customer site. And might be on a laptop, palmtop, desktop, Blackberry, across a link that might be 3G, Wi-Fi, or metro Ethernet.
So what do carriers need to do to deal with this seismic shift? Quite a lot, actually:
* Erase the distinction between consumer and business users. In this country, at least, most people work for a living. Therefore they’re employees of a business. And they’re also consumers. Yet carriers’ marketing and product offerings rarely, if ever, reflect this. They imagine that home users merely want to consume content by surfing the Web and downloading movies — yet these same home users are also business users who need to create content by building servers, sharing files and collaborating with peers. Carriers: Stop pigeonholing your customers! Market holistically.
* Make end devices easy to use. In a business context, that means integration with key business applications — including the company’s IP PBX or enterprise collaboration server.
* Focus on security and availability. Companies regularly tell me they’re favoring BlackBerries over other mobile devices — because they can be locked down. When the endpoint can be anywhere, perimeter protection is pointless. But ease of use and secure availability are always in a tug-of-war. Balance is key.
* Decouple your users from your network. Carriers, you can no longer count on users being on your networks! So how do you maintain their loyalty (and continued revenue stream)? For starters, provide the best and most reliable devices, so even if they’re not on your network, they’re still loyal to you. Your users may need one tool for business purposes and another for home — give ’em both, and make them easy to integrate. (How about secure address sharing between personal cell phones and business PDAs?). Enable effective, reliable roaming. Your users don’t care whether bandwidth is WiMAX, 4G, or wired broadband. Neither should you. Finally — make sure you have sound business relationships with the wholesale service providers. As I discussed in my last column, look into crafting a peering exchange
The bottom line? Anywhere connectivity is already upon us. The provider who adapts the fastest will win.
Johna Till Johnson is president and chief research officer at Nemertes Research, an independent technology research firm. She can be reached at johna@nemertes.com.
