Aug 17, 2001 : Carriers Climb Value Chain with IDCs

📅 August 17, 2001 - The Internet Data Center (IDC) has emerged as the keyvehicle for carriers to move up the value chain by offering new services totheir data networking customers, according to Cahners In-Stat Group(instat.com).

The IDC is a next generation central office designed to meet the new economydemands of e-business. The high-tech market research firm reports thatcarriers are expected to be filling their existing IDC capacity and buildingnew IDCs over the coming years, resulting in a significant increase inworldwide carrier IDC revenues for co-location, managed hosting andapplications, storage and content delivery services.
"For the past couple of decades, carriers have been evolving their networksfrom voice to data and converged multimedia networks. The next stage in thisevolution is to offer value-added services for data customers," says HenryGoldberg, senior analyst with In-Stat's voice and data communications group.
The IDC offers a set of outsourced Web site and data management services forbusinesses, which relieve them of IT staff requirements or having to operatetheir own corporate data center. Along with these services, carriers alsobundle data networking services to provide connectivity from the IDC toother company sites, remote users, or business partners.
"Carriers have various competitive advantages that they can bring to the IDCmarket, when competing against specialized non-carrier companies providingsimilar services. These include bundling of a range of data networkingservice options, end-to-end Service Level Agreements for applications, anestablished customer base for networking services, carrier-class IDCreliability, and financial soundness," says Goldberg. Carriers thateffectively exploit all these strengths should be well positioned to winmarket share from the non-carrier competition.
In-Stat has also found that darriers may offer co-location, managed hostingdedicated or shared, applications services, storage services and contentdelivery services in an IDC. Worldwide carrier IDC revenues are estimated togrow at a 56% CAGR from 2001 to 2005.
The benefits of outsourcing include reduced in-house IT staff and datacenter requirements, reduced capital and operations costs by takingadvantage of service provider economies-of-scale and quality-of-service(QOS) guarantees on Web sites, applications availability and performance.
The report, "Emerging Internet Data Center Strategies of Carriers," profilesten carriers that are leading Internet Data Center service providers. Theirservice strategies and Internet Data Center deployment plans are discussed.In addition, the report profiles two leading suppliers for the building andmanagement of Internet Data Centers. Please see In-Stat's site for orderinginformation.