Mobile Technology and Emerging Markets Drive Telecom Spending Recovery, According to New Research from Yankee Group

Annually, Yankee Group assesses the health of the global telecom market by analyzing regional capital spending plans of telecommunications service providers. These plans not only take measure of the global and regional spending plans of the operators themselves, but also serve as a barometer for the prospects facing solution vendors highly exposed to the telecom sector. Key findings from the firm for 2011 include:

	Capital spending will increase 2.9 percent from 2010 levels, from U.S.$267.9 billion to U.S.$275.7 billion. Stabilization of the macroeconomic environment will lead to overall capital spending growth after two straight years of decline. Yankee Group forecasts that global telecom capital spending will continue to rise through 2014.
	EMEA and Latin America will grow capex the most. EMEA will grow by 5.1 percent, while Latin America–buoyed by strong demand for mobile broadband and value–added services (VAS) and aggressive investment by multi–national operators such as Telefonica–will grow by 6.2 percent.
	Asia–Pacific will remain resilient. The Asia–Pacific region, which was predicted to experience a dramatic drop in spending among Tier 1 operators in China, proved to be remarkably resilient in their spending levels for 2010 and came in roughly flat (we had expected a drop of more than 10 percent). A continuation of this investment cycle is expected in 2011, with capex growing 4.4 percent year over year.
	North American capex will decline by 3 percent. North American operators will decrease spending slightly, from $70.8 billion in 2010 to $68.7 billion in 2011, making North America the only region reducing capex in 2011.

The telecom industry turned out to be remarkably resilient in the face of the severe recession spurred by the global financial crisis that began back in 2007. Nearly every sector of the economy saw significant contraction, but the telecom industry, propped up by explosive demand for mobile data products and services, continues to achieve steady growth.

Most vendors in the telecom space will look to emerging markets to find new organic growth in the current environment and need to focus on taking share from competitors in mature markets while competing on managed and/or professional services in all markets. While telecom services have crossed the chasm from luxuries to necessities (in the same vein as electricity), fierce competition, in particular from the Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, will ensure growth will not be easy.

About Yankee Group
Yankee Group is the preeminent research and advisory firm equipping enterprises to profit in a mobile world. The core of the firm’s content is proprietary research and analytics on the attitudes, behaviors and usage patterns of mobile users.

DonRiver, Inc. awarded massive multi–year Transport Network Inventory Program

Melbourne, Australia, one of the country’s Tier 1 Communications Provider’s announced they have selected DonRiver, Inc. to lead the design and implementation of migrating their existing transport network into their strategic logical network inventory platform.

The solution, among other things, will require DonRiver to configure and model network equipment and technology types, perform data migration, integrate to new and existing legacy systems, and deliver significant process automation. The solution is expected to leverage many existing components of the Tier 1 Communications Provider’s existing logical network inventory suite to meet business and system requirements.

”Whenever you work with transport technologies such as SDH, PDH, DWDM, etc. it can be a challenge; when you then add an incredibly complex data migration, numerous system integration points, defining future business processes and other work components into the mix it becomes an even bigger challenge. The Communication’s Provider’s decision to select DonRiver demonstrates their continued confidence in our ability to deliver. Our client recognizes that we have world–class delivery capabilities – we look forward to the challenge and delivering the program.”, says John McVey, Director at DonRiver, Inc.

The multi–year program is expected to deliver significant business and IT benefits to the Tier 1 Communication’s Provider – some of which include improved data accuracy, increased service activation timeframes, improved capacity and utilization of network assets and a reduced total cost of ownership.

The program is expected to complete in 2013.

For further information or specific details pertaining to this program of work, email us at press@donriver.com.