Cloud poses serious threat to CPE market

That’s according to a new study from ABI Research, who says this move poses a serious danger to the CPE market. Senior analyst Subha Rama says that by 2016, the Customer Premises Equipment market will only grow by only 4 per cent:

 

“For CPE vendors, the cloud threat is real. By 2016, the communications CPE market will only grow 4.3 per cent, while cloud communications will grow by over 21 per cent, reaching $8 billion in revenues.”

 

Smaller vendors with point solutions will see cloud services rapidly displace their installed bases. Large vendors are becoming cloud providers or key enablers as well.

However, many of the CPE solutions are simply not cloud ready and will see performance downgrades when virtualized.

 

The research suggests that three prominent forces are influencing cloud migration: The growing adoption of data centre architectures and virtualization technologies; the need to integrate multiple applications to deliver the connected experiences across different devices; and the promise of lower costs and increased efficiencies from cloud-based processes.

 

ABI Research says that enterprises are adopting a non-linear approach to cloud migration – while certain applications undergo experimentation, others are retained on premises. Mixed environments and hybrids are becoming the norm, especially with larger enterprises. However, practice director Dan Shey says the technology to manage hybrid clouds and to enable seamless movement of applications instances across different vendor clouds is in its infancy:

 

“Enterprise mobilization is also driving migration to the cloud. Cloud applications ease application delivery for businesses that are increasingly relying on access across fixed and mobile endpoints.”

 

The ‘Enterprise Cloud Applications and Vertical Analysis’ report covers four implementation types – CPE, private, public, and hybrid clouds – for each application type: telephony, email and collaboration, audio conferencing, web conferencing, video conferencing, and UC.

 

 _{Photo by John Kerstholt, via Wikimedia Commons}