ACG Research

ACG Research
We focus on the Why before the What

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Business Cases for Brocade: Software-Defined Networking Use Cases


Brocade has developed three SDN use cases built around an SDN controller and Brocade’s MLXe series routers that are compliant with the recommendations of the Open Networking Foundation.

ACG Research analyzed the TCO, network capital expense (CapEx), network operation expense (OpEx), and labor cost to process service orders of the three use cases. It found that SDN dramatically increases the speed of bringing order processing systems online and the speed of processing individual service orders. The time to set up the order processing system is reduced from one year under the PMO to four months using SDN. The time to process a single order is reduced by a factor of seven. Though direct costs of building and operating the network are reduced by using SDN the majority of the business benefit of SDN is derived from speeding up and reducing the cost of the service order process.


For more information about ACG Research's business case analysis service and SDN services, click here.

For more information about Michael Kennedy, click here.






Michael Kennedy
mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Did you know …


In a recent interview I was asked about ACG Research and to explain our mission and what the company does.  In the course of the Q&A, I discussed the following aspects of our company:
  1. Stands for Advanced Consulting Group   
  2. Was launched in October 2009
  3. Landed its first deal with AT&T
  4. Focuses in the Service Provider space
  5. Offers quantitative and qualitative market research, business case analysis and consulting services
  6. Employs analysts that are subject matter experts in their coverage space
  7. ACG's HotSeat videos are the most viewed in the industry
  8. ACG makes is easy for you to do business with our team
  9. ACG's Capacity Index service (measures how hot SPs’ networks are) and Financial Index service (measures the risk level of vendors) are the first services of their kind in the industry
  10. ACG focuses on the Why before the What
For more about ACG Research go to our website (http://www.acgresearch.net/) or read our analysts’ insights on our blog (http://acgresearch.blogspot.com/). Check out our free Market Impacts, articles and whitepapers at http://www.acgresearch.net/. Or to speak to an analyst and find out more about the segment s/he covers and services related to the segment, contact sales@acgresearch.net



Wednesday, January 16, 2013

CES 2013: One Big Step for Mobility


CES 2013, which has truly established itself as a major mobile venue for North America, wrapped up with record attendance last week, with major innovations and announcements by vendors of all sizes and industry segments. The show has transformed itself from a pure television and consumer electronics forum, to a cross-industry event representing market segments ranging from Ultra HD TVs to a Rolls Royce electric car. Interestingly, it was only eight years ago at this show during Bill Gates’ Windows Media Center demo, which resulted in the historic blue screen of death. 

Bits and bytes
Also present at CES was FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Despite some heckling, he announced additional 195MHz of spectrum will be allocated in the 5GHz bad for WiFi 802.11ac, also known as Gigabit WiFi. This is the first time in more than 20 years the FCC has allocated such an amount of public use spectrum without a multibillion dollar auction process. How times have changed ….

Although Mobile World Congress continues to be the leading global mobile industry venue, CES has received noticeable attention from mobile infrastructure, devices, platform, and ecosystem vendors this year. All major device and platform vendors made key announcements, ranging from Huawei’s 6.1 inch Android smartphone to Panasonic’s 20 inch tablet. 

Mobile got star attention at CES 2013. Gone are the days of titans promoting Blu-ray disc format to mainstream vendors.  Instead there were displays of the latest processors and handheld devices running Android. Chinese vendors spent significant resources to showcase new innovations, with Huawei receiving very positive media attention (rare in the North America trade press). 

With the absence of US tech giants (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.), Samsung stole the show with its bold announcements and innovations. Traditionally known for its conservative methods, Samsung surprised the industry and openly discussed developing projects such as its San Jose, CA, Display Lab innovations (featuring flexible screens) and spoke about its partnership with ARM, showcasing first- generation Octa-core processors. 

CES 2013 captured the mobile industry’s attention and this is significant, especially where tweets, specialist bloggers, and trade media rarely have spent keystrokes to recognize the venue. Oddly, this year trade media financed their editorial staff to cover the news and events. Even mainstream pundits who had publicly denounced and written off the CES event this year, later embarrassingly admitted they were wrong. CES is now a mainstream mobile venue for North America.

For more information about ACG’s mobility services, contact sales@cgresearch.net.



Tuesday, January 15, 2013

How to Arm Your Teams for a Competitive Advantage


When providers look for better performance and value from their networks they cite high availability, security, quality of service, multicast capability and comprehensive management products and services, and most vendors’ staff is very adept at positioning and pitching their products and services to address these attributes. But in these economic times with the plethora of products and services hitting the market and companies demanding more value add from vendors as well as information to assess risk, companies have to be armed with concrete and independent data about the sustainability of not only their company but also about other vendors. Companies need financial information that they use to help their clients or potential customers review risks when selecting a vendor to meet their business needs and ascertain the level of risk related to the stability of the vendor despite the vendor’s technology innovations. 

There are many financial indicators that can help your company better position your products/services, and ACG Research has compiled 15 ratios and Z scores into its new Telecom Vendor Financial Indicator service. The 12 vendors tracked have performance scores that fall into four categories: sustainability, technology, operations and marketing. The index examines standard financial ratios, validated by Wall Street, related to profitability and liquidity. We then rate the sustainability of vendors.  

Why is understanding the sustainability of vendors important to both providers and vendors? These scores as well as the back-up data allow enterprises and service providers to understand the risk level they are taking when selecting a vendor. At the other end, vendors can use the tool to better position and make a solid case for selecting them over the competitor. For both sides, there is concrete information on which to make decisions, not just the sales pitch. It can differentiate your team and company as exceptional, not just standard, another advantage in this current climate. 

For more information about ACG Research’s Telecom Vendor Financial Indicator service or to have our analyst meet with your team to discuss market trends in the industry that this service supports contact sales@acgresearch.net.




Join ACG Research at the SDN Precon at ITEXPO Miami


Software-defined networking is considered by many to be one of the most important and potentially disruptive developments in networking since the rise of the Internet. To date, networks and connectivity have come first, and applications have followed. SDN turns this model on its head, approaching networking from an apps-first standpoint. In this SDN preconference at ITEXPO Miami, we (including ACG Research’s Eve Griliches, optical analyst) will:
  • Define SDN
  • Look at the technologies and components involved in SDN
  • Review the use cases of SDN
  • Identify the players involved in moving SDN forward
  • Discuss what this all means for networking as we know it

For more information about this event, visit: http://www.sdnzone.com/conference/

For more information about Eve Griliches, click here.




egriliches@acgresearch.net 
www.acgresearch