Economic downturn not affecting 2009 telecom budgets - (Indicated by XO sponsored research)
Depedence on network functions help telecom budget stay afloat
Wide Area Networking Alert
By Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler , Network World , 01/22/2009
Today, we're continuing our interruption of our series on 2009 telecommunications projections to share some breaking news that we think will be of great interest. We've just completed the "2009 Network Plans and Priorities State of the Market Report," and it contains some quite encouraging trends. In fact, the subtitle for the report is "Good News in a Challenging Economy."
To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available report on telecom spending and priorities that has been published with data collected since the economy took a nosedive this fall. As noted in the report: "Despite the worldwide economic crisis, the outlook for networking is relatively positive as companies look to telecommunications as a path to surviving - and even thriving - in these turbulent times."
The report adds: "Overall, telecommunications will see some negative impact, but telecommunication services budgets are remaining essentially at existing levels. This is most likely due to an increase in dependence on networking functions as a part of business processes, and may especially be due to an increase in the use of managed services."
As noted in the report, the key findings include:
* While there will be a negative impact on 2009 telecommunications budgets, this impact is not expected to be severe, and over one-third of the companies expect no impact or some degree of increased funding. Overall, a quantitative index for users showed the anticipated impact to be halfway between “No Impact” and a “Moderate Negative Impact.”
* Companies will be dependent on telecommunications more than ever, but there will be little additional funding (or, overall, a decrease in funding) to support both ongoing and new initiatives.
* Funding for telecommunications services and staff salaries will be the least affected of the areas about which the respondents were queried. These two subcategories will, for all practical purposes, see no significant change.
As further noted in the report: “The bottom line from the above-mentioned trends is that the effective use of telecommunications networks will not only be a key component in surviving the current economic conditions, but effective use can actually allow a company to thrive in these conditions.”
The independent report, which was made possible in part due to the support of XO Communications, is available now from the Webtorials editorial/Analyst Division here.
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