Ovum flags reseller opportunities for intelligent networking

Telco analyst company Ovum has released a report which claims the most difficult job role for almost any enterprise company at the moment is the CIO.

What Ovum calls the “intelligent network” – that is, an ever more connected and smarter network in the workplace and outside it for the enterprise – is more relevant than ever. It points out that the number of smartphones in use will be over 600 million in 2015, meaning the traditional enterprise network model is in a transitional period.

Principal analyst at Ovum, and report author David Molony, said that in today’s organisation, the “CIO has the hardest job”. They are under pressure to do “more with less” – more so than ever before, within business and end-users.

Of course, Bring Your Own Device is one trend that is not going away. As ChannelBiz has pointed out, IT managers and CIOs will have to adapt quickly to emerging consumer technologies if they hope to avoid becoming dinosaurs in enterprise. “The evolution of technology will only add to the pressure on increasingly burdened CIOs,” Molony added.

An intelligent network, Ovum argues, will attack the challenges head on. It must look at both end user and customer requirements, while managing traffic effectively and providing an easier and larger range of billing, payment and cost management tools – promoting distribution and consumption on-demand.

Ultimately, Molony said, IT will be decentralised away from the traditional enterprise vanguard. This could be daunting at first but CIOs will have greater leg-room to put their time into innovation and making sure their IT departments are equipped to match business and user requirements.

Speaking with ChannelBiz UK, Molony said Ovum was specifically looking at what telcos can do to raise their game. But, he said, value added services can be brought into the intelligent network.

“From our point of view, what we were looking at was telcos wanting to lock their enterprise customers into their networking services by giving them more features and more facilities on the networks – monitoring, applications performance, and controls,” Molony told us. “But I wouldn’t say that, from a reseller point of view, that it means resellers can’t get a position in this area of intelligent networking.”

“The way the telcos are positioning it pre-supposes that the CIO or IT manager will take more control of network services,” Molony said. “Within a telco managed service environment. But, from what I see talking to enterprises, there are still plenty out there that would be prepared to take the software elements, and the tools and technology, to do a bit of their own intelligent networking.”

According to Molony, you could “easily” imagine a hybrid environment where CIOs are using telco managed services. “That could be direct, or through a reseller,” he said. “At the same time they could be putting elements of intelligent network management into their own networks.Those elements could come from a reseller or direct from the vendor, and the CIO of the enterprise would be building that bit themselves.”

Already, some businesses have built their own networks for their own service control. It would be fair to see a future in networking as a hybrid model, Molony agreed. “I definitely think there will be a significant number of enterprises that will want to do that,” he said. “I suspect it’s going to be a certain kind of enterprise – more mid-market and medium sized enterprises.”