Telecommunications carriers have been warned to lift their game by changing their data centre strategies or risk losing business to competitors, according to an independent telco analyst group.
Ovum, in a recent report, claimed telco carriers were seen by end users as less agile, innovative and receptive to trends, such as the migration to Cloud services, than their independent data centre counterparts.
Ovum analyst and the report’s author, Mike Sapien, said carriers needed to undertake drastic changes to remain key players and evolve into worthy cloud providers, as data centre independents were quickly building expertise and winning over business.
Sapien also said the relative success of the independents was attributed to their showcasing of new technology and systems, and introduction of advanced data centre features and facilities to businesses.
“Carriers need more focus in this area and are losing ground to independents as a result,” he said in a statement. “However, if they adapt some of the strategies of the independents to have global reach, they can make it back and have a place with the major data centre and cloud service providers.”
Despite telco carriers falling short in the areas of agility, innovation and trend awareness, Sapien said they claim the advantage of having more strong relationships with large multi-nationals than independents and that carriers should should utilise these partnerships and profit from them.
“ ... The government and education sectors are traditionally strong markets for large carriers and many organisations are now considering a move to hosted and cloud services,” he said.
“Carriers should take advantage of existing relationships, create new ecosystems and partnerships within their data centre portfolio and show clients that they can meet their needs.”
As the industry shows no signs of dying down, with the developments of the Equinix data centre and the Macquarie Telecoms data centre in Sydney, telco carriers are encouraged to take on Sapien’s advice.
Two telcos that have recently followed this heed for progression and offered cloud services to their customers are Telstra and Optus, where the former pushed large enterprises to adopt the cloud while the latter was forced to defend its cloud services were more than just vaporware.