During one of our recent internal strategic planning sessions with our industry and technology consultants, we had an interesting epiphany:
The type of information being distributed or broadcast over wired and wireless networks has been changing dramatically over the past few years, as has “network dependency.”
Having been involved in telecommunications and data networking architecture and support for over 25 years, we have seen enterprise customer’s use of their networks dramatically change and evolve. We won’t go into a lot of detail, but will try to fast-forward the evolution.
Originally most enterprise data networks were designed and managed to transport text-only information from dumb terminals to large computers, and are now transporting VoIP packets, file transfers from servers to mainframes, image files, e-mails, WAV files attached to e-mails, etc. The networks linked corporate offices and branch offices together, whereas now they link corporate offices, branch offices, employee home offices, employees on the road and have also extended out to business partner/supplier locations (whether corporate or extended).
So what? we asked ourselves during our roundtable discussion.
We believe that the “so what” for the telecom and technology industry is a more complex customer relationship to build, manage and maintain which assumes that the industry can evolve into selling and servicing this type of customer relationships.
On the positive side for the industry, it also means that the customers are more “network dependent” as they depend on the networks to not only transport their internal corporate information (disregarding media), but to reliably transport information to and from their suppliers, vendors and, most importantly, their customers.
So we throw down the gauntlet for Canadian telecom providers (new and old) to develop methods to sell and service to us “network dependent” customers. They also need to help us prove real business value to our senior leadership for the growing network infrastructure costs, as we continue to expand our use of wired and wireless network technologies.
We believe that the players that can do this will truly be the long-term winners in the “wired wars”.
Roberta J. Fox is the senior partner at the Fox Group. She welcomes your thoughts and feedback on this topic by contacting [email protected].
