BROADBAND 'ADD ONS' MARKET FORECAST TO DOUBLE BY 2011
The prospect of market saturation by 2010 and of ever-reducing margins should be encouraging today’s business broadband providers to look to complementary ‘value-added’ services to expand and grow their portfolios and their profits.
This is the view of a new report from Analysys*. It looks at what small and medium-sized companies in the UK, France and Germany are currently buying in terms of broadband services, and at what they are likely to be buying three to four years from now.
Based on the evidence of the American market, the future may lie in advancing from pure broadband access to the sale of ‘broadband add-ons’. These include cost-effective managed solutions that are enabled or delivered over broadband, ranging from VoIP and network security packages to hosted data and ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS).
Analysys forecast that there will be strong growth in this ‘add-ons’ market sector across Western Europe that will see the annual spend by SMEs almost doubling by the year 2011, from 5 billion Euros now to 9 billion Euros. The result could be a "key area for exploitation" for broadband providers that can pick up the challenge to diversify and innovate.
*Source: "Strategies for selling more to SMEs: analysis of demand for broadband managed services and service bundles" (Analysys, March 2007).
READ BETWEEN THE LINES
And there is a webcast of the key findings of BT commissioned research into the behaviours driving churn in the SME sector in the UK –
Reducing Broadband Churn in SME Market.*Source: "Strategies for selling more to SMEs: analysis of demand for broadband managed services and service bundles" (Analysys, March 2007).