SINGAPORE--Carriers should invest in carrier Ethernet to boost the reliability and bandwidth of their systems, which are essential to meet the needs of enterprise customers looking to deploy business-class cloud. But they need to consider their customer profile and needs before investing, stated insiders.

Goh Boon Huat, vice president of business products at Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), acknowledged that talks of carriers becoming "irrelevant" has been making the rounds as core services such as fixed voice and SMS (short message service) are commoditized. Thus, carriers will need to rethink how they make use of their network assets and find new models to drive value for their customers, he added. The executive was a keynote speaker at the Carrier Ethernet Asia-Pacific conference held here on Thursday.
 
One way to do so is for carriers to package their full stack of services and network and sell these to their enterprise customers, he suggested. SingTel, for one, has integrated its basic voice and data services, IT services such as managed services, unified communications and cloud computing services "tightly" and have given customers the option of procuring these services as a bundled package or on its own, the vice president noted.

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In Amsterdam, October 11–14, the IIR held the 7th annual Carrier Ethernet World Congress (CEWC). Carrier Ethernet continues to grow solidly, driven by upgrades to the mobile backhaul portion of the network. Future carrier Ethernet growth could come from new initiatives such as cloud services. The optimal architecture for core bandwidth management continues to be debatedCarrier Ethernet traffic growth forecast: mobile today, clouds tomorrow

Verizon, one of the global leaders in the Ethernet service market, provided a good snapshot of the current state of growth for Ethernet services. Verizon characterized its overall Ethernet service growth at 20%-plus for the last few years. This is an impressive year-on-year growth figure given the number of years Verizon has been offering Ethernet service and the current scale of Verizon’s Ethernet business. Verizon noted that traffic from the cell tower to switch, i.e. mobile backhaul, was “going crazy, pushing tremendous bandwidth through the network.” While the “packetization” of the mobile network continues to be a major driver of growth for carrier Ethernet, cloud services have the potential to be the future driver of traffic. It is still...

The carrier Ethernet equipment market continues to grow, having reached $12.7 billion in 2010. Even though the market is growing strongly, deployments vary widely by region and by application, which has driven requirements in different directions, forcing vendors to think hard about where to place their R&D investments.
 
RAD Communications is one example of a small vendor trying to expand with the market by taking a focused approach and using internally developed ASICs for its EAD (Ethernet access device) NIDs (network interface devices). The technology allows the company to specifically configure its EADs for business services and mobile backhaul applications to lower costs for network operators. This is a must for any vendor competing in the $4.7 billion EAD market, which accounted for over one-third of all carrier Ethernet spending in 2010.
 
As noted in Ovum’s soon to be published “Market Segment Profile: Carrier Ethernet,” carrier Ethernet technology is being used more extensively in the established economies of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia-Pacific (Australia, South Korea, Japan) than in less-developed markets, including China, India, MEA, and SCA.

The complexity of the cloud computing arena is a major stumbling block to adoption, according to delegates at this week's NetEvents business IT symposium in Rome.

Ovum analyst Peter Hall presented the analyst house's growth forecast for the cloud market and outlined a global $66 billion market for cloud services by 2016. He said the market was worth $14 billion in 2010 and that there would be a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent. Ovum's figures cover software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service.

For instance, he estimated that Amazon represented about half of the IaaS market, but that was only worth around $400m out of the total $800m, and that Rackspace only had 10 percent of that total.

At the moment, said Hall, Salesforce.com was still the key player in the much larger SaaS market and held up to 30 percent of the PaaS market.

He predicted a shake-up though with the rise of the telcos as they ploughed more cash to support cloud infrastructure as they went after more end user cash for services. Hall said players such as AT&T, BT, Orange and Tata, along with Verizon would be looking to eclipse the revenues taken by Amazon through multimillion dollar deals with large firms.

The carrier Ethernet equipment market continues to grow, having reached $12.7 billion in 2010. Even though the market is growing strongly, deployments vary widely by region and by application, which has driven requirements in different directions, forcing vendors to think hard about where to place their R&D investments.
 
RAD Communications is one example of a small vendor trying to expand with the market by taking a focused approach and using internally developed ASICs for its EAD (Ethernet access device) NIDs (network interface devices). The technology allows the company to specifically configure its EADs for business services and mobile backhaul applications to lower costs for network operators. This is a must for any vendor competing in the $4.7 billion EAD market, which accounted for over one-third of all carrier Ethernet spending in 2010.
 
As noted in Ovum’s soon to be published “Market Segment Profile: Carrier Ethernet,” carrier Ethernet technology is being used more extensively in the established economies of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia-Pacific (Australia, South Korea, Japan) than in less-developed markets, including China, India, MEA, and SCA.