2020 was a watershed year for the industry as they proved to be the backbone for the rapid changes in work practices, communication and entertainment. This has led telecom providers to embark on their won digital transformation journeys.
The challenges continue for the industry, especially as 5G has not yet delivered on the early promises. Telecom operators today are having to provide cutting-edge services and top-notch customer experience as they continue to be challenged by new market entrants and strong regulatory pressures.
In 2022, telecom providers will be driven by the need to innovate and improve their product and service lines; improve customer experience; comply with changing regulations; and to optimise costs.
Read on to find out what Ecosystm Analysts Darian Bird and Matt Walker think will be the key trends in the telecom industry in 2022.
In the recently published the Top 5 Cybersecurity & Compliance Trends for 2021 report Ecosystm predicts that 2021 is when M&As will ramp up in earnest to consolidate the fragmented cybersecurity market. The pandemic has slowed down M&A activities in 2020. Early signs of what we can expect from the market when we emerge from COVID-19 can be seen in the recent acquisition of Asavie by Akamai Technologies. The market is realising the full implication of the shift to remote working and the potential of increased cyber threats – and this acquisition is a sign that larger vendors will continue to strengthen their cybersecurity capabilities by acquiring vendors, with complementary capabilities.
Asavie Enabling the Secure Office Anywhere
Asavie, headquartered in Ireland, offers a global platform that manages the security, performance, and access policies for mobile and internet-connected devices. Asavie delivers secure access to business resources for a mobile workforce – without requiring installation and management of client software. Increasing mobile workloads and Office Anywhere trends mean that the enterprise private network is no longer just PCs/laptops. All enterprise endpoints must be considered to be a part of the enterprise network – and security and authentication solutions must be able to handle this. Organisations will need to explore options where they can give seamless access to their employees without straining their IT and cybersecurity teams – a rapidly installable, scalable, and cloud-managed solution will become a necessity.
More than ever before, enterprises will have to treat all endpoints as branches of the organisation, and the Future of Work goes beyond enabling home offices. The Global CXO Study: The Future of the Secure Office Anywhere finds that 66% of IT and business leaders think of multiple locations, when they think of Office Anywhere. Employees will work wherever they get the best work experience and are most productive. Future work patterns will require that all endpoints are considered as extended branches of the organisation. This involves the ability to extend the enterprise WAN – with speed, flexibility, and security in mind – whether it is a temporary or a home office, an ad-hoc point of sales or an employee on the go. Every employee or device should be treated like a Branch of One.
Ecosystm Comments
“Akamai has been diversifying away from its well-known content delivery network (CDN) offering and has successfully built its security business offering in recent years. In 2019, the company nearly doubled its security revenue to USD 849 million from just USD 488 million in 2017. In their 3rd quarter financial results reported in end October 2020, the Cloud Security Solutions revenue was US$266 million, up 23% year-over-year.”
“The move into the mobile security segment has been timely for Akamai as enterprise application and content is moving from behind the firewall to the cloud; adding to the criticality of the cybersecurity threat management. The COVID-19 pandemic has further driven the onboarding of businesses and consumers alike, adding to significant addressable market opportunities.”
“The acquisition of Asavie is a strategic move. Asavie’s solution effectively extends the enterprise security management to incorporate mobile devices as a ‘Branch of One’ enabling CIOs and CISOs to manage security and policies the same way as traditional enterprise network resources. The growth of 5G will further drive IoT devices and a myriad of applications and use cases which will provide for a significant growth opportunity for Akamai – the acquisition of Asavie is a positive move to support this trend.”
Akamai Strengthens Intelligent Edge Capabilities
Asavie’s mobile, IoT and security solutions will integrate with Akamai’s Security and Personalisation Services (SPS) product line sold to carrier partners that embed the solution within the technology bundle sold to their subscribers. With the Asavie acquisition, Akamai intends to help their carrier partners address enterprise and mid-market customer demand for IoT and mobile device security and management services.
Ecosystm Comments
“The addition of Asavie to Akamai’s SPS product line provides synergy for the company to expand into new addressable markets for the remote workforce and internet-connected devices to deliver superior experience in a multi-cloud environment. The Global CXO Study conducted by Ecosystm found that three quarters of the organisations rate mobile security as an important or very important part of their digital transformation strategy. Secure mobile experiences will be a core element of the enterprise going forward in the post COVID-19 business environment – driven by employee needs for mobile services and corporate resources from remote locations, with superior identity and policy management, in a frictionless manner.”
“There is an opportunity for mobile service providers and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to leverage the Asavie solution combined with Akamai’s strength at the edge with over 1,500 networks worldwide to offer cloud-based value-added cybersecurity services. The Global CXO Study also found that scaling of endpoint security was a major pain point for half the organisations with more than 100 branches. Service providers can become the enabler by offering services for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to dynamically adapt their network and security services to fluctuating demand conditions.”
“Although Akamai does offer CDN services for the SME segment, the company heavily relies on service providers and carriers to address this segment in the CDN, cloud security and its burgeoning IoT Edge offerings. Asavie’s market approach is similar and its products and services portfolio appears to complement Akamai’s very well, making it a very good fit for the company. Not only will it enhance Akamai’s SME positioning on the secure connectivity space, but it will also boost its offerings for carriers in the IoT space.”
“Carriers have had a checkered history at best, in understanding and making the most of data services. Mobile Internet took off because of smartphone manufacturers (Apple) and Internet companies – not through carrier offerings. Although carriers appear to be more proactive and forward-looking with regards to IoT, they should not expect to have the foresight to see what services and business cases will make 5G and IoT truly profitable. Rather, their main focus should be on enabling the secure and flexible infrastructure that can ultimately enable others to develop the use cases. The next logical step would then be for carriers to develop IoT orchestration platforms that can manage much larger parts of the IoT value chain. If they succeed in this (and even if they don’t) it could result in a major boost for Akamai’s CDN business.”
“In other words, carriers need help with IoT and to that end, Akamai’s acquisition of Asavie may strengthen its ability to support carriers to reach that goal.”
The full findings and implications of The top 5 Cybersecurity & Compliance Trends For 2021 are available for download from the Ecosystm platform. Sign up for Free to download the report.
Last week, HPE announced that they will acquire Silver Peak – the wide area networks (WAN) specialist, including WAN optimisation and Software-Defined (SD-WAN) – in a deal worth USD 925 million. The move is in line with HPE’s Intelligent Edge strategy and their intention to provide a comprehensive edge-to-cloud networking solution.
HPE Building Intelligent Edge Capabilities
In 2018, HPE announced their intention to invest USD 4 billion over the next 4 years, to build an Intelligent Edge offering. This acquisition will give them the ability to combine the Aruba Edge Services platform with Silver Peak’s SD-WAN platform, to provide next-generation networking solutions.
In 2015, HPE acquired Aruba for USD 3 billion to strengthen capabilities on integrated and secure wireless technology and to support the access to cloud application, at a faster speed. Bringing together the innovation and technology capabilities of both units will accelerate HPE’s edge-to-cloud strategy to enhance distributed cloud models for application and data services for users.
Ecosystm Principal Advisor, Ashok Kumar says, “HPE leaped into the wireless local area networks (WLAN) space with the acquisition of a major enterprise Wi-Fi network vendor Aruba Networks, five years ago. With the acquisition of SD-WAN vendor Silver Peak last week, HPE extends enterprises’ reach with its Intelligent Edge portfolio. The synergy of Aruba and Silver Peak provides a fuller enterprise networking portfolio of solutions for HPE.”
The acquisition has been announced as markets are gearing towards recovery and organisations are opting for a more distributed working environments with remote employees. Kumar says, “The convergence area of networking and security at the enterprise edge is a high growth area that has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic to address the remote worker’s needs.”
The current situation, compounded by the 5G rollouts in several global markets, is also forcing telecom operators to transform their business models. Telecom providers will now have to increasingly target B2B opportunities. Last month also saw HPE announce their Edge Orchestrator, a SaaS offering bringing lower latency, optimised bandwidth and improved security and privacy for telecom providers and their own enterprise customers to take advantage of 5G. Aruba Networks also rolled out a cloud native platform, Aruba ESP that has AIOps, Zero Trust network security and a unified infrastructure for data centres capabilities, to support remote operations.
“HPE’s success in this area will be dependent upon the tight integration of the two product line portfolios, and the channels of distribution, to effectively address the needs of enterprises at the edge with smarter solutions,” says Kumar.
The Growing Importance of SD-WAN
In the report, The Top 5 Telecommunications & Mobility Trends for 2020, Ecosystm had noted the growing significance of SD-WAN for enterprises, as they undertake Digital Transformation (DX) journeys and require more responsive and self-sustaining networks. The entire network infrastructure will have to be software-centric allowing for agility, scalability, and normalising costs with business growth. This has proved to be especially true in the wake of the current crisis.
“The network is a foundation on which a significant amount of Digital Transformation (DX) becomes possible, so as companies move through their DX journeys, often changing course, the network will need to adapt with them. AI, virtualisation and SD-WAN will bring increasing levels of flexibility as they lessen the need for specialised hardware, centralise control, and speed up configuration changes.
The availability of high-bandwidth, low latency networks coupled with SD-WAN will allow enterprises to shift away from thinking of their network as a physical space and start seeing it as a set of capabilities, taking work beyond a physical address. Equipment will be increasingly centralised in data centres (possibly on the Edge) to provide the ability to truly work anywhere.”
Download Report: The Top 5 Cloud Trends For 2020
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