New Intermediaries Re-Define Wholesale Telecoms

May 2010 | 16 pages | ID: NC8651A70B7EN
Ovum

Abstracts

Twenty-first century wholesale telecoms is evolving to address the needs of an emerging class of enterprise intermediaries. These customers look like multinational corporations, but behave a lot like telecoms companies. They purchase large volumes of telecoms services, bundle them into their own products and then resell them to their customers. Even if the telecoms infrastructure is invisible to the end user, in Ovum’s analysis it remains an important component of the intermediary’s product and therefore qualifies as wholesale.

Contents

Executive summary
In a nutshell
Ovum view
Recommendations for players
Key messages
Survey methodology
About our survey
Changing wholesale communications
Fundamental wholesale definition
Extending the definition
Intermediaries are critical
To limit or not
Wholesale by any other name is still wholesale
New intermediaries equal new opportunities
Semantic differences on content: accommodating Web 2.0 enterprises
Living with strategic decisions
Addressing content
Segmentation of intermediaries
No universal agreement
Consensus segments
Segmentation evolution
Keeping it to themselves
What makes a customer wholesale or retail?
Volume
SIs: wholesale or retail?
Wireless
Market responsiveness requires flexibility
Building wholesale relationships
Internal content delivery = retail; external = wholesale
Reclassification is not easy
Pragmatism helps when classifying customers
Internal struggles
Bottom line definition
A wider range of intermediaries

List Of Tables

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Interviewed carriers by headquarters location

List Of Figures

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Wholesale definition
Figure 2: Accommodating Web 2.0 enterprises