Market Scan

For years, the telecom industry has been aggressively expanding into IT services to offset declining revenue from traditional voice and data services.

Today telecom's infrastructure-focused IT services such as computer hosting are already commoditized. Telecom companies are trying to figure out how to climb up the IT stack towards application-focused software services where the business value is more direct and the margins higher. As it turns out, the Application Service Provider (ASP) model proved that turning licensed, single-tenant, traditional applications (such as those from Oracle) into a managed service doesn't have the required economies of scale. More importantly, the ASP delivery model is a stretch for the subscription/usage-based telecom providers.