All major vendors offer some limited to complete outsourcing capabilities in either advanced services or outsourcing of management of the network operations center. The goal of outsourcing is to allow a provider to focus on other priorities like; customer acquisition, increase value to customers and deliver value add services such as cloud computing or other up-sell services.
Service providers are either true telco or a carrier and tend to be very slow to move to a new technology or offerings potentially missing inflections in the market. Their internal silos and sales teams are set up to sell connectivity and access and less able to sell the advanced offers, such as unified communications, cloud offers and video services, demanded by the market.
- ACG Research investigated nine companies with unique profiles and ranked them on their ability to address key factors:
- Communication and Unified Communication: Offers which build on connectivity and take IP communications and convergence to the next level.
- Technology Portfolio: Virtualization end-to-end portfolio and technology that creates value and customer stickiness.
- Multivendor: Capabilities to address service providers’ environment to deal with outsourcing all or part of their infrastructures.
- Connectivity Capability: Knowing what the outsourcer’s capability is in providing robust connectivity to meet demands of providers as a customer.
- Customer Service: The ability to create value for on demand, on time resolution and coverage in the markets the providers do business.
- Change Management: What are the processes to change the current do-it-yourself in-house provider IT to outsourcing or out-tasking parts of the network? Does the outsourcer have change management processes tuned to carriers?
- SP Specific Offers: The outsourcer’s ability to have a dedicated team and tune multitenancy offers to handle the environment of the providers.
- System Integration Skills: The ability for the outsourcer to offer system integration to customers of the providers or to the provider to address gaps in migrating a customer or provider to a virtualized infrastructure or process.
- System Integration Experience: What use cases and customer lists can the outsourcer cite?
- Cloud Vision: What is the outsourcer’s ability to outline the cloud reference architecture and deliver technology, thought leadership and understanding of the provider’s cloud opportunity?
- Cloud Experience: In looking to an outsourcer for quick time to market there are requirements that dictate that the outsourcer has done this before and in many instances. What use cases can the outsourcer cite?
Our Outsourcing report covers the following: Cisco, HP, IBM, Globecomm, Avaya, CSC, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and NSN. For more information about this document contact ACG Research at sales@acgresearch.net.
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