Together, software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) have become the most highly-anticipated developments in network infrastructure in over a decade. A software abstraction layer sitting above a set of virtualized hardware resources can transform the way service providers (SPs) do business – improving service velocity, lowering costs and drastically increasing business agility. Effectively, NFV and SDN can reduce the time needed to deploy and augment networks from months down to days.

The value of this has certainly not been lost on the wider market.  IDC has reported that the global SDN market will see compound annual growth of 53.9% between 2014 and 2020, estimating it at nearly $12.5 billion. IHS has similar expectations – predicting that the global network functions virtualisation (NFV) hardware, software and services market will reach $11.6 billion by 2019. The mass migration of enterprise IT to the cloud, along with associated data, applications, compute and storage resources have all contributed to this rapid growth. And the upsurge in end-user and consumer demand for data intensive applications and cloud-based services has compounded it.

Both SDN and NFV are powerful technologies with the capability to transform networks; however, the transition needs to be done with the customer, in this case enterprises, in mind. Enterprises require hybrid IT infrastructures that offer choice and ensure the desired level of performance at the right cost. They also want to be able to order and activate it via self-service digital interfaces when and where they need it. This means SPs should be focussing on transitioning to SDN / NFV solutions that enable this hybrid IT infrastructure, by enabling a programmable, on-demand packet-optical based network to a wide variety of private and public data centres and cloud providers. Virtual networking services can then be added on top of these new hybrid IT infrastructures as an easier way to deliver managed network services (from managed firewalls and managed routing to managed WAN optimisation, and so on). Virtualisation means these services can now be conveniently deployed, at the right price, with flexible terms; opening them up to small and medium enterprises—currently a largely untapped market.

SPs are already enabling hybrid IT infrastructures where SDN can add value, building out for specific deployments and replacing legacy components with new technologies as networks are upgraded, but this will take time. Luckily, there are plenty of opportunities to look to for.

The vendor community, however, is already taking steps in the right direction, and in so doing reducing what could be a complex, time-consuming integration process through a DevOps style approach. This allows for the rapid creation of service templates and enables SPs the choice of adding new services and features themselves, or utilising third-party vendors and/or solution integrators as required. Ultimately multivendor communities will ensure that the resources that enable network, data centre and virtual domains to be connected will be more accessible.

For SPs in particular, moving from closed, proprietary hardware-based architectures to more open, on-demand software-driven networks has become mission critical. Programmable infrastructures that can rapidly adapt and provide the flexibility needed for higher-level cloud-based applications, means improvements to service modifications can be rolled out far quicker. The revolution, however, begins with the customer – identifying new and innovative virtual services that enable hybrid IT infrastructures and delivering them with velocity.

Source: Telecom.com

Businesses all over the world are adopting digital platform to reach audience at large. A study from Juniper Research has found that global digital advertising spend across mobile, wearable and online devices will exceed $285 billion by 2020, up from an estimated $160 billion in 2016. This will be driven by an average annual growth of 22% in mobile and wearable advertising spend, as brands and retailers continue to invest in mobile consumer engagement.

Technology is a driver for revenues. A new research found that despite the rising adoption of ad blockers, better audience targeting will drive higher click through rates and increase publisher revenues. Social media platforms such as Facebook, are utilising their unprecedented audience knowledge to offer advertisers highly accurate targeting, thereby increasing the click through rates that advertisers are witnessing now. The report highlighted that increased ad revenues will be further driven by faster real time bidding processes from exchanges. By streamlining the bidding process, page load times are reduced thus increasing the user experience.

Mobile is also an important platform for advertising. Last year saw ad revenues from mobile platforms surpassed those from online platforms. However, mobile ad blocking adoption is expected to increase over the next 5 years as users bring the benefits of the technology onto their mobile devices. The research also warned that publishers will have to contend with the introduction of network level ad blocking. The amount of money advertisers will spend on mobile ads will grow significantly in the next four years, a new report by Juniper Research suggests. Digital advertising has become an important part for an enterprise. It garners maxim leads and revenues and most importantly awareness about the company and its offerings.  Technology, internet plus easing of norms from the government add to this scenario. Everything said, the most essential part of digital advertising is adaptability by the people.

Mobile internet consumption is now growing at the expense of all other media and 71% of internet consumption will be via mobile. The report, by media firm Zenith titled Media Consumption Forecasts, forecasts that the average time spent with mobile internet globally will grow 27.7% this year, while time spent with desktop internet will fall 15.8%. All traditional media will shrink this year-cinema (0.5%), outdoor (0.8%), television (1.5%), it says. Mobile technology is transforming the way people around the world consume media, and is expanding overall media consumption.

Desktop internet consumption grew rapidly in the early years of this decade, peaking at 52 minutes a day in 2014, up from 36 minutes a day in 2010. But desktop consumption is now in decline as users switch to mobile devices. In 2015 mobile overtook desktop to become the primary means of accessing the internet, and this it is forecasted that people across the world will spend on average 86 minutes a day using mobile internet, compared to 36 minutes using desktop internet. This means that 71% of internet consumption will be via mobile. The region most heavily skewed towards mobile internet consumption is Asia Pacific, where 73% of internet consumption is mobile, closely followed by North America, where the mobile share is 72%. Despite its recent decline, traditional television remains by far the most popular of all media globally, attracting 177 minutes of consumption a day in 2015. Internet consumption came second at 110 minutes a day. In India, television continues to account for 49% of the time spent and is the largest medium in urban markets. Out Of Home (OOH) is the second largest medium with 22% of urban time spent. Digital is the third largest medium. Digital now accounts for 16% of time spent in urban India, on all media, up from just 4% in 2010. 90% of digital time used to be on the desktop in 2010. Today, it has come down to 27%, with 73% being on mobile.

It has been cited that businesses are set to spend more on mobile Internet advertising than for ads seen via desktop computers for the first time in 2017. Zenith said it is expecting companies around the world to spend $99.3 billion on mobile Internet advertising in 2017, or 2 percent more than the amount it expects to be spent on ads seen on web pages on desktop computers. All of these developments are a result of internet accessibility in mobile. Mostly it provides traditional media owners the opportunity to reach people and places they’ve never had access to previously, and gives consumers entirely new ways to find and enjoy compelling content.

Source: telecomlive.com

With businesses increasingly turning to cloud computing for factors like sharing resources for big data storage, software and processes, India’s telecom authority has proposed regulating this segment of industry. The paper sought comments on the steps government should adopt to promote cloud computing in e-governance projects, establishment of data centres in India, encourage business and private organisations to utilize cloud services and to boost Digital India and Smart City incentive using cloud. Cloud Computing has four attributes — data intensive, resource pooling, scalability and rapid elasticity and On demand access. It can be operated in one of the four deployment models — public cloud, private cloud, community cloud and hybrid cloud.

Consultation paper mentions of privacy and data protection, potential for forced data localization , the prevention of cross border data transfer and taxation of cloud services .TRAI has also posed questions regarding provisions so that a customer is able to have control over his data while moving in and out of the cloud. The other areas in which it has sought comments include provisions for billing and metering re-verification of cloud services, how disputes are to be addressed, mechanisms for customer complaints and the security aspects of such services. There is an unanswered question on policies, systems and processes required information governance, framework in cloud from legal point of view and most importantly if it is hosted in a different country. There’s a point where the TRAI also points towards the possibility of licensing‘intermediate service providers’, without exactly specifying what kind of entities they are referring to. For a regulator which appeared to be avoiding broad consultations and taking up issues one by one, this is a bit of a disappointment. It’s hard to find an online service today that doesn’t deploy cloud based services, and this consultation thus has the potential to effect every Internet business, and thus availability of services to users in India.

Cloud computing has accounted for about 33 per cent of the total IT expenditure in 2015 across the world. Analysts project that from 2013 to 2018, the cloud computing market will grow at a 9.7 per cent annual rate. Also, by 2019, cloud IT infrastructure spending is expected to be $52 billion, or 45 per cent of total IT infrastructure spending. In India, cloud computing has huge potential for industries. Verticals such as retail, railways, manufacturing, banking, education and healthcare have started switching their on-premise applications to cloud services for optimized reach and performance as well as elasticity and scalability.

Source: Times of India

Video Conferencing promises immense opportunities in the healthcare market especially allowing doctors to connect with patients and other parts of the medical staff instantly and easily. According to a new market research report published by Credence Research “Video Conferencing in Healthcare Market – Growth, Share, Opportunities, Competitive Analysis and Forecast 2015 – 2022”, the global healthcare video conferencing market was valued at US$246.0Mn in 2014 and is estimated to expand with a CAGR of 12.1% from 2015 to 2022. The research report shares insight pertaining to the global Video Conferencing in Healthcare market. Video conferencing in Healthcare enables easy medical support within no time and reduces the need for unnecessary hospitalization and travelling. Conferencing solutions are available on premises as well as cloud based. This makes them feasible for both healthcare organizations as well as patients. The most significant factor fueling the market growth is the overall rising shift towards Telemedicine services worldwide. Due to rising advancement and investment in the healthcare IT infrastructure, the healthcare video conferencing market is expected to witness high growth in the coming years.

Healthcare organizations experience advantages such as better patient care, collaboration among the healthcare teams and easy and faster training from video conferencing solutions. The healthcare practitioners and patients can reduce the costs associated with regular office visits. Physicians can be anywhere monitoring and collecting patient. Healthcare industry is also getting support from governments for development of IT infrastructure for betterment of services. Besides doctor-to-patient communication, video conferencing is also allowing hospitals to create networks to provide each other with support and consults. By easily sharing their expertise outside their own institutions, doctors can offer incredible value to their medical colleagues and those colleagues’ patients. As a result; the global healthcare video conferencing market is estimated to register strong growth in the coming years.

Nevertheless, the major factors hindering the market growth are the financial and technological challenges in the market. Additionally low technology awareness and acceptance among the people is another factor contributing to the challenges of the market. The global healthcare video conferencing market is consolidated in nature with few major international players contributing to more than fifty percent of the total market revenue. Some of the major players operating in the market include Polycom, Inc, Cisco Systems, Avaya and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Healthcare video conferencing market is quite nascent as compared to the overall video conferencing industry. Thus, these companies continuously emphasize on development of advanced solutions with minimal price in order to gain a competitive edge in the market.

Indian telecom companies have always been quite vocal about their dislike for over-the-top (OTT) services such as messaging and calling apps as it provides similar services and penetrates into their market, eating into their biggest revenue streams. Telecom companies have made a strong case to TRAI about OTT services hampering revenue and seeking recommendation on regulation of OTT service. It is an undisputed fact that VoIP (voice over internet protocol) service offered by OCSPs (OTT Communication Service Providers) is a substitute for services offered by telecom service providers (TSPs). Telecom companies have been having a hard time trying to increase revenues, especially as SMS usage drops and messaging apps become the norm. Most users do not have to incur extra costs of SMS because of free calling apps, phone calls. This meant that telecom companies started promoting data plans instead of talk time or SMS plans and as a result data adoption and usage has increased. But telecom companies are realising that this change comes at a high cost.

OCSPs offer these services without holding any license in India, which violates the Indian Telegraph Act. The Licensing and Regulatory Regime cannot allow a situation where in the licensed entity is treated at a lower footing than an unlicensed entity. As a matter of fact communication apps offer calling services at far lower rates than carriers – mostly a consumer just pays for the data consumed – thus eating into the telcos’ revenue pie. Voice still accounts for around 80% of a telco’s revenue. Telcos want these apps to pay the same levies such as license fee, spectrum charges etc besides follow rules around security, lawful interception, quality of service. This could mean the apps wouldn’t be able to offer calling and messaging services virtually for free because of the increased costs.

It noted that mobile phone operators realize only around a sixth from a data call made over the communications apps compared to what they realize from a normal voice call. The low data price is furthering the growth of VoIP/Internet Telephony by unlicensed OCSPs at the cost of PSTN voice telephony, thereby reducing TSPs ability to continue with the lower price of data for accessing content over the Internet. Thus OCSPs should be brought within the ambit of Indian regulatory landscape. It is important that TRAIL addresses the issues surrounding termination charges from calls from a communication app to a regular cellular network, but keep in mind the ongoing court cases around the issue of termination charges. Issues such as allocation of a separate number series for internet traffic, security, lawful interception, quality of service needs to be sorted out before termination of internet telephony calls is facilitated in PSTN/PLMN network.

Customer experience software solutions provider Amdocs has launched core network testing service for telecom operators. It will help to deliver superior customer experience by ensuring high service quality, while reducing total cost of network ownership and accelerating time to market for new services. The new service will address the growing complexity of physical and virtualized networks as well as new network technologies and services such as 4G LTE and VoLTE.

Today service providers are introducing advanced LTE services and transforming to open virtualized networks to improve service agility.  Amdocs is planning to take advantage of the growing demand and deploy new network features at an accelerated rate for faster and rigorous testing cycles across complex multivendor physical and virtual networks.  Amdocs brings a vendor-neutral approach to core network testing with strong network credentials in orchestration, policy and service control, and analytics, along with extensive experience in RAN and SON testing tools and practices.

The Amdocs Core Network Testing Service provides test scoping and planning, network equipment testing, interoperability testing, pilot testing, network test lab management and device certification for both physical and virtualized network functions (NFV) testing. By utilizing a common Amdocs BEAT framework and methodologies powered by data analytics, Amdocs can unify and automate IT and network testing activities, including operational and business support systems, and now the network packet core. According to recent research conducted by Coleman Parkes for Amdocs, service providers are currently using more than four different vendors on average to conduct network testing to support service introductions. This highlights the need for a holistic approach that will simplify the overall testing process across the LTE packet core and IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) applications such as VoLTE.

According to the latest market report published by Persistence Market Research  VoIP (voice over internet protocol) services market worldwide is forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 9.5% over 2016-2024 to reach $194.5 billion by 2024. The global VoIP services market is driven by factors such as low maintenance cost with higher flexibility and minimum staff support, along with wider connectivity, increasing internet penetration in semi-urban and satellite cities as the internet is a basic tool and a global platform to make a business grow fast and in a more economical way. However, factors such as fluctuations in internet quality may affect market growth and can be a prominent restraint. During peak hours, the network may be congested due to many subscribers using internet services in a locality through single-cable network line and unsatisfactory contract proposals are some of the major factors expected to restrain growth of the global VoIP services market during the forecast period.

The market report suggested that the global VoIP services market has been segmented on the basis of call type, end use, configuration, services, and region. The APAC (Asia Pacific) VoIP services market is expected to account for the highest market value share in the global VoIP services market by 2024 end, followed by Europe. The Latin America VoIP services market is expected to be the fastest growing market over the forecast period. Growth of the Europe VoIP services market is primarily attributed to the introduction of a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises. The VoIP services market in Europe is expected to increase at a CAGR of 8.4% in terms of value over the forecast period.

The report provides detailed information about various market trends and offers analysis and insights about the potential of the global VoIP services market. Furthermore, the VoIP services market is segmented on the basis of call type into international long-distance VoIP calls and domestic VoIP calls.  International long-distance VoIP services segment is estimated to be the highest contributor to the global VoIP services market in terms of value share by 2016 end, followed by domestic VoIP call segment. The VoIP services market has also been segmented on the basis of end use into Individual User and Corporate User. Individual User segment is expected to be the fastest growing segment in the end-use category over the forecast period. The segment is expected to increase at a CAGR of 9.2% over the forecast period in terms of revenue.

Looking at India, over the past two decades the Indian telecom industry has changed dramatically. The shift from landline phones to mobile phones was quick. VoIP is a new addition in the technological advancement in the Indian telecom industry. The scenario changed in May, 2012 as the Government of India’s National Telecom Policy 2012 allowed full-fledged use of VoIP in India. This regulation is expected to give rise to a new boom in the telecom industry. Telecom players are expected to shift their focus to VoIP because of its enormous advantages over mobile. The residential VoIP market is a completely untapped segment which the companies have already started to penetrate and open further scope for the industry.

Cisco announced Jaipur to be the first smart and connected community ‘Lighthouse City’ in South Asia. Cisco Lighthouse City status credential is assigned to a select list of cities all over the world. This development will help Jaipur gain access to Cisco’s huge global network and channel program capabilities. The Lighthouse City engagement will be enabled through a joint working group, which will focus on deploying next generation technologies to impact citizens and society. Jaipur now joins the league of Cisco Lighthouse Cities globally such as Hamburg (Germany), Barcelona (Spain) and Adelaide (Australia).

Cisco is partnering with Jaipur to develop smart city infrastructure that will improve the efficiency and quality of services for sustainable urban development. This will lead to management of city operations and delivery of new services to citizens. Cisco is also in talks with other technology companies such as Qualcomm Technologies Inc, General Electrical and 3M India Ltd to launch an Innovation centre in Jaipur.  The centre will be housed and operated by Genpack and help to speed up co-innovation of Internet of Everything (IoE) based solutions. The Innovation Centre will be hosted by Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) and also team up with startups, developers, government agencies, and academic communities.

For example 3M’s common technology platforms, diverse and unique products in the areas of Public Safety & Security, Smart Transportation, Smart Grids and Smart buildings can contribute substantially to offer practical solutions to urban problems. Even Qualcomm is committed to the advancement of smart cities in India and address complex challenges that Jaipur is facing. The role of wireless technologies, edge processing and machine learning can help empower such cities to make them more efficient, livable and sustainable. Genpact will also provide a number of services and solutions to help clients operate smarter from Jaipur city. It will provide IoE solutions for industrial asset performance using analytics combined with its disruptive Lean Digital SM approach that facilitates the effective use of digital technologies all the way from the front, middle and back end of its clients’ operations.

Jaipur city’s association with Cisco will set an example for other cities in South Asia. It will gain access to Cisco’s huge global network and channel program capabilities which will help in economic and social transformation.

World renowned cab aggregator Uber has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Kempegowda International Airport, Bangalore to set up a dedicated parking area and pick up zone for its drivers and passengers. The assigned zone will be called U Zone and Uber will be deploying its executives to assist passengers. It will be like a free door to door service for passengers. Having set a price differential in the industry , Uber will slightly change its strategy and keep Rs 8 per km, regardless of the type of service. The base rate will be Rs 180 , with an additional of Rs 8 per Km, plus Rs 1 per minute and Rs 120 for toll expense.

Users have to select ‘U Zone’as their location once they land at Bangalore Airport and with assistance reach the U Zone to find their cabs.  Online cab service companies need to keep pace with the growing demand in the country. It is very necessary to keep a price differential model and attract customers and forward convenient services. Corresponding to the changes in the industry, many online cab aggregators have come up with developments in their models and strategy.  For instance, Uber was ready to cap its fares at rates fixed by the government, giving up its surge pricing model in the city. It also stopped its UberMOTO bike taxi service in Bangalore to work with the government “to create modern regulations for app-based motorbike services.” Uber plans to re-launch UberMOTO in Bangalore in the future, but does not mention timelines.

A Lot of challenges are faced by online cab service. In a recent case Online cab service Magic Sewa alleged that that Airport Authority of India (AAI) and Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) were giving ‘preferential treatment’ to taxi operators Easy Cabs, Meru and Mega Taxi at the Delhi airport by waiving the Rs 150 entry fee, while imposing it on other cab operators. The designated zones of online cab services are likely to solve this problem to a large extent.