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NewsvineIdentifying Market Opportunities: Applying a Telco Vertical Focus
October 9, 2007
Summary
Vendors of all types are starting to see the notion of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) dominate much of the discussion within the information technology (IT) industry today. SOA improves capital and operational cost structures and increases business and application flexibility.SOA within the Telecommunications Industry
For the Telecommunications Industry in particular, SOA is a strategic imperative and key enabler of the required transformation process that must take place if these companies are to fend off further marginalization and become profitable providers of modern communications services.Specifically, Telecommunications Service Providers (i.e., Telcos) are working to deliver more than bandwidth, but rather unified communication services (i.e., email + IM + VoIP + video, etc.) that are intelligent, policy sensitive, tie into their users' personal community preferences, and synchronize with one’s changing-by-the-minute mobile presence on any given day. SOA enables this as a Web-based application architecture that organizes the Telcos' infrastructure into loosely coupled, intelligent, and interchangeable modules that provide flexibility, faster service turn-up, and lower operational costs for new business services.
In summary, SOA is designed to accelerate process improvements and facilitate business innovation, which is much needed in the Telecommunications space—especially as industry consolidation continues to exacerbate the problems associated with the Telcos' highly redundant operational environment.
Symantec in the Telecommunications Industry
In recent years, Symantec has established a significant footprint within the global Telco industry, and in most cases is considered an IT best practice for data storage management, protection, and high availability. This footprint has grown over the past year to include security and to provide protection capabilities to the Telco's Next-Generation Network (NGN)—the area within the Telco environment that absorbs the majority of their cap-ex and op-ex dollars. This is especially true as key NGN initiatives such as SOA and the like leverage open, server blade-based architectures and standard operating systems such as Linux.In addition to protecting the operator infrastructure, Symantec has recently placed a great deal of focus on protecting the mobile device (the modern day PC) from new attack vectors. Here we are delivering on the need for unique and more comprehensive protection capabilities beyond just anti-virus, including features such as loss mitigation, file logging, anti-spam, VPN, and firewall.
Accenture and Symantec in the Telecommunications Industry
Innovative Telecommunications companies need much more than just SOA behind their transformations of products, services, and business processes. Accenture and Symantec are able to leverage their Global Alliance and assert the benefits of our Security Transformation Services, along with data protection and virtualization technologies as critical components to the SOA blueprint. Together, Accenture and Symantec can incorporate a comprehensive threat management software layer into SOA. More broadly, our partnership can help drive protection into other key entities that touch or comprise the Telco operations environment, such as mobile devices and data, the digital home, business process management, unified communications, portals, and the Telecom's next-generation intelligent control layer known as IP Multi-Media Subsystem (IMS).Accenture is clearly an SOA thought and market leader. Symantec brings a security-centric mindset plus 150,000,000 PC endpoints and a strong IT data center presence that is moving to include the Telco's network and mobile devices as the new predominant endpoint. This creates an exciting dynamic for the Symantec and Accenture partnership in that we can assert our collective thought leadership to the benefit of our Telco customers and the markets that they support. As Telcos pursue game-changing initiatives such as SOA, working together to ensure that this architecture is protected, secure, and highly available is a great first step.