As an analyst exploring new digital services, I try to practice what I preach. I designed Informa’s Telecom Cloud Monitor with Caspio. I use Evernote for project and information management. My interactions are logged on Salesforce.com. I like Skype, and I’m warming to Lync (my 9,000-employee firm just switched to Microsoft Office 365 – hooray!). And yes, I’m using Twitter, LinkedIn and experimenting with [...]
British Telecom TV ads of the ‘80s are fondly remembered. Their star, suburban housewife Beattie (geddit?), encouraged a nation to talk. In one famous ad, Beattie comforts her hapless grandson about his dismal exam results. Discovering he’s at least passed sociology, she exclaims: “You get an Ology, you’re a scientist!” Many telecom operators think the same about [...]
Microsoft Office 365 is becoming to telco SaaS what the Big Mac is to fast food. That’s not a health warning, but a fact, based on a 38-country study* of 51 communication service providers’ business SaaS portfolios that I’ve just completed. Microsoft powers an astonishing 51% of these CSPs’ productivity and collaboration offers. Want a SaaS [...]
All aboard! France’s SNCF wants your cheeks on a seat – but not necessarily on a train.
If you watched Wimbledon’s epic showdown live on television, then you have Telstar to thank. Launched 50 years ago, the Telstar-1 satellite, brainchild of Bell Labs, made international live broadcasts possible. On July 10, 1962, the age of global communications truly began.
Trending on Twitter isn’t a traditional political goal. Nor is having a Facebook page with thousands of friends. But that’s exactly the point. The European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe doesn’t want old school methods to talk to citizens or to broadcast its views. Instead, it wants to involve every European in critical decisions that will help stimulate Europe’s digital economy – knowing that these decisions are tightly linked to the European Union’s entire future.
Africa is my destination this week. I’m on a mission that’s both personal and professional.
Officially, I’m here to work with clients, catch up with our growing regional team and speak at Informa’s inaugural Cloud Africa Summit.
Unofficially, I hope to prove myself wrong about the déjà vu that I feel about aspects of Africa’s ICT market.
The IMF just said that sub-Saharan Africa is beginning to stand on its own feet, pointing to its sustained and major progress since the millennium.
One petabyte a day: That’s how much data BMW’s Connected Drive cars will generate by 2017 reckons BMW Group IT infrastructure chief Mario Müller.
It’s about time for a shakeup. And for a mere £1 billion (US$1.7 billion) in cash, Vodafone may pull it off.
If successful, its bid for Cable & Wireless Worldwide creates nothing less than a new top-tier player in the global enterprise telecoms market.
Metro-land: For Londoners, it’s a swathe of leafy commuter suburbs built alongside the Metropolitan Railway in the early 20th century. Marketed as an escape from cramped urban life, Metro-land even inspired poems from poet laureate John Betjeman:
Verizon’s buy of innovative startup CloudSwitch is a nasty surprise to those who deny the growing power of telcos in the cloud.
Working in the telecom industry is a tricky business. Restructuring is a way of life, market consolidation is urgently needed, and margin defence – let alone growth – is a consuming pre-occupation. Then there’s the internal issue of turf: Who owns which customer? For builders and operators of telecom infrastructure, that’s a critical issue to address – right now.
The post-Valentine’s Day mood stayed downright friendly at Day Two of Mobile World Congress, as partnerships and alliances dominated the show chatter.
Prada did it with Miu Miu; Dolce & Gabbana with D&G. Now Verizon’s $1.4 billion purchase of Terremark applies a business model from the catwalk to cloud computing: The launch of a ‘diffusion’ line.
Consolidation, convergence and competitionCalls for consolidation in the European mobile market grow louder by the week and four-operator markets look increasingly challenged. Now, those mobile operators that have already built scale seem to be suggesting that there is no option but to expand yet further through diversification.
It is testament to Telstra’s aggressive approach to mobile broadband that an operator in a country of just over 23 million people should rank in the top ten operators worldwide in terms of LTE subscriber numbers. Mike Wright, Telstra’s executive director for networks and access technologies talks to Telecoms.com about the firm’s plans for further enhancing its LTE operation with fresh spectrum and LTE-Advanced capabilities.
Jonathan Bell, VP of Marketing at OpenCloud, discusses how policy and pricing are just two dimensions along which telecoms operators can differentiate their propositions. By adding a third dimension, the service behaviour itself, operators can define and bring true innovation to the market that surpasses the traditional approaches of the past, he says.
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With summer supposedly fast approaching, many look to trim some fat and get in shape for the sunny months. The Informer has never been a huge fan of gyms; in fact his favourite machine in the gym is the one that sells chocolate. Telefonica’s UK arm O2, is one business that is looking to get lean for the holidays, though, and this week it announced that it is to trim 3,500 UK employees.