Once corporates had a single telecoms supplier. Then they had many. There is now a trend to moving back to a single supplier. This is not a step backwards, rather it shows how technology advances and business maturity is making telecoms simpler for the corporate buyer.
Ten or more years ago, an enterprise had one option when it came time to get telecoms services. Perhaps you needed X.25 for branches and Diginet for head office. You needed lots of voice lines, so you ordered BRIs or PRIs. And you called one phone number - your nearest Telkom office.
The services on offer were limited, and support was often mediocre, but at least you had a single point of contact when things went wrong, and you only had one bill to pay at the end of the month. You didn't get exactly what you wanted, but the telecoms service was the same as that of your competitors in the industry.
Then in the late 90s the comms market exploded - almost literally. Suddenly there was a host of companies selling telecoms services - some with very advanced technology that our incumbent national operator was not able to supply, some with vertical specialisations that a national operator would not service, or cutting-edge technologies that upended traditional pricing models.
Value added networks proliferated, and large enterprises started buying connectivity from several sources, including new services like international expedited data, local SLA-backed guaranteed data, least cost routing, voice over data services, VPN services and secure offsite backup services. If a smart IT manager knew his or her business, they'd have the best available technologies on call to meet their business requirements.
But best-of-breed comes at a cost. More dollars and cents, increased complexity, increased business risk from dependence on many third-parties, possible technology dead-ends. This has to be weighed against the rewards: a competitive market meant IT directors could now demand better service, faster response and ideally lower prices. The new players largely flourished.
Now, after 10 long years of telecoms free-for-all, things are settling down, and you're faced with the possibility of once again having only one person to call when you want something or you're not happy. The difference is that now one company is able to offer any service that you cold possibly want - and you have choice from several competing operators.
Why have we reached this state? Because the telecoms industry has matured, and the implementation of standards based on the Internet Protocol (IP) has given operators the ability to offer virtual services over the same physical infrastructure. Not even the software industry can pull different elements together as easily and transparently as in telecoms nowadays. That's because telecoms ultimately comes down to bits and bytes travelling down pipes. Unlike the old days, today's data pipes are defined only by performance metrics, not technology dependencies. You don't need to pick X.25 or SONET or ISDN or Frame Relay. You ask for an IP connection with particular metrics, and with specific services available.
So how would such a best-of-breed - but also one-stop-shop - telecoms operator work? Think of an international flight. You buy the ticket from your favourite airline, but most of the trip you're dealing with their service partners. The airport check-in. Security. Baggage handling. Catering on the flight. In-flight telephone calls. You may not even be actually flying in your favourite airline's plane. But you're happy to do it, because your airline provides the quality of service guarantee, and the customer service representative. They do what they're best at, and bring in partners and suppliers that are good at what they do. What happens in the background in the supply chain is of less and less interest to the buyer, as long as the price, function and support levels are right. So it is becoming with telecoms.
As a customer of telecoms services, you need someone with whom to negotiate a service, you need to be taken care of from a service and support point of view, but whose routers or pieces of fibre your packets travel through is largely immaterial.
Technologies have converged, and advances in flow switching allow traffic to easily traverse different networks while still allowing quality of service metrics to be maintained, along with security and end-to-end significance. A network service provider can take a customer's traffic, find an appropriate cost-effective third-party network service provider if necessary, and deliver it where it needs to go.
The obstacles to this kind of business are no longer physical - they're business. Network service providers need to negotiate partnerships with other network providers to allow them to confidently on-sell services under their own brand's wrapper. Back-end management and accounting systems have to be set up to ensure that the customer never needs to know - or care - how his traffic gets from A to B.
How many kilometres of fibre you have, or how many acres your data centre takes up, is no longer interesting to telecoms customers. The success of an enterprise telecoms solutions provider will now lie in its ability to service and support customers - and service and support its network of service providers in the background - and ensure one group never has to know about the other.
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