A new report released by telecom market research firm RHK Inc. shows that the North American market for Telecom OS Service Fulfillment will reach $1.8 billion in 2001 -- growing 17 percent annually through 2004 despite heavy pressure on service provider capital expenditures. Although the overall growth in Service Fulfillment will be lower than previously thought, due primarily to CLEC failures and significant declines in voice switch deployments, certain segments in Service Fulfillment will continue to show aggressive growth.
Service Fulfillment applications help service providers operate their networks more efficiently by reducing labor costs, improving capital utilization, and accelerating revenue. RHK's "Telecom OS Service Fulfillment Forecast" includes revenue for switched voice provisioning, transport engineering, OS interconnection and flow through provisioning for service providers. The forecast does not include internal service provider spending, system integration or enterprise management systems. Although expectations for this market's rapid growth have been altered by the current economic conditions, RHK's report highlights flow-through provisioning as the key technology driving growth in service fulfillment for the next four years.
"The downturn of the North American telecom market has affected service fulfillment deployments significantly, with most surviving service providers carefully evaluating their OSS expenditures," states Larry Goldman, RHK's Director for Telecom OS - Service Fulfillment. "However, flow through provisioning will show strong growth as service providers seek to gain the productivity and profit benefits of automation." Goldman continues, "Service fulfillment spending is shifting to support new services and new technologies such as IP-VPNs and intelligent optical networking as service providers work to maximize return on their network investment."
RHK expects growth of service fulfillment to come from applications such as customer self-care, provisioning of broadband services including DSL and IP-VPNs, support for intelligent optical networks and deployment of 2.5G and 3G wireless networks. These applications address major issues associated with rapid provisioning of new service orders and managing the complexity of converged services networks.
"We expect Tier 1 service providers to continue to work on lowering network operations costs with new high-volume services and to use automation to improve customer service," says Goldman. "All service providers will look for ways to cut operational costs and improve network utilizations. Service fulfillment fundamentally addresses this need by automating manual processes that are expensive and prone to errors."
The "Telecom OS Service Fulfillment North America Forecast" explains the growth of specific market segments and shows the drivers for each. This continuous information service from RHK's STARTRAX product offering provides market share and analysis reports, market forecasts, and vendor and service provider profiles, in addition to other standard program deliverables.
About RHK:
RHK Inc. is a global industry market research and consulting firm specializing in the analysis of advanced technologies for the public telecommunications network. RHK's areas of expertise include: access networks including optical, DSL, and fixed broadband wireless; core and edge switching and routing; long-haul and metro optical transport; optical components and communication semiconductors, WDM, SDH, undersea; operational support systems; voice infrastructure and newly emerging technologies. RHK is based in South San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit www.rhk.com.