There is no doubt that the operational and financial appeal of “The Cloud” is gaining more traction each year and across a wider spectrum of businesses, with Gartner[1] predicting that more than half of IT spend will be Cloud related in 2016 and over half of large enterprises having a public/private hybrid Cloud platform by 2017.
What is also evident is that the more the “X-as-a-service” range grows the more the Cloud becomes a compelling and realistic option for mid-size and smaller agile businesses, who see the flexibility it offers not only as a way of controlling costs but also critical in terms of staying competitive by enabling greater alignment between IT consumption and market fluctuations. This pragmatic approach particularly applies to multi-branch organizations where application and data sharing is crucial to the productivity of the business, which otherwise could mean significant IT investment in potentially redundant LAN-based resources and expensive localized support systems.
To derive the full benefit from the Cloud, agile businesses need to engage with equally agile communications service providers (CSPs), which are able to deliver fast and reliable access capable of supporting a broad range of granular, all-IP based services in an exclusively WAN-dependent environment. Using the same argument it follows that agile CSPs need equally agile technology vendor partners, who can help them to respond to the evolving demands of their customers with flexible and scalable products at competitive price-points.
Traditionally, CSPs have had limited choices when it comes to selecting the CPE router devices that provide the access gateway to the Cloud, particularly for the highly competitive and price-sensitive small to mid-range branch office sector. Although the leading router vendors such as Cisco are geared towards the major enterprise market, in the perceived absence of a real alternative these well-known suppliers have typically gone on to become incumbent partners for many CSPs.
However, we are now seeing this trend beginning to break down as CSPs look to gain competitive advantage in a buyers’ market and last year our new generation of multi-service routers, purpose-designed for CSPs, over two quarters out-shipped Cisco in Europe for the smaller, branch office customer sector. These routers not only enable CSPs to offer high performance SLAs but provide a platform for a range of value-added services that can both enhance the user experience and ensure efficient bandwidth provisioning for both data and voice-based, fixed-line and mobile, communications.
The good news is that, working collaboratively with the CSPs, OneAccess has now extended the range to deliver 500mbs performance and beyond, providing highly competitive and flexible platforms for the delivery of future-proof Cloud-based deployments.
