About the only thing Nostradamus really got right was making predictions so far into the future that no one could reliably verify his accuracy. Prognosticating is a tricky and risky business.
Thankfully the analyst team at Stratecast doesn’t look hundreds of years into the future — only one. And they don’t write in quatrains, which would make their claims harder to re-interpret to fit the occasion. And to make their 2010 forecast even more reliable, they show where and why they went slightly askew in some of their predictions for 2009.
The Stratecast team nailed their outlook on cloud services saying they would move from being strategic to marketable in 2009 — and they did. They, along with others, got the demand for Ethernet right and said it would have been even stronger had standards for the network-to-network interface ever materialized. They were comfortable, for good reason, with their prediction that consolidation would continue for Tier 2 and Tier 3 telcos despite the economy. And they were sure right about advertising becoming a fierce battleground.
However, the team got a little over-enthusiastic about a few things. It projected bigger movement in the shift from a good old-fashioned network performance focus to one of application performance. “Enterprises still grappling with infrastructure issues have yet to demand end-to-end performance guarantees,” the report said.
And they thought over-the-top (OTT) video services would have matured more quickly. “OTT has not achieved anything like the consumer attention necessary to be called market leading,” the report said.
The team was perhaps toughest on itself in the area of the back office. The OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies team got a lot right, such as the growth of product life cycle solutions, the recognition of a need for a new service layer, the continued hesitancy of service providers to invest in real analytics for subscriber data and the growth in actual implementations of customer experience management solutions.
But it took itself to task for missing on other areas. They thought, for instance, that fulfillment and assurance functions would be working with a new inventory environment by now. The reality is that inventory has continued to prove difficult to replace. They thought BSS and OSS vendor consolidation would continue in the face of competitive and financial pressures. It didn’t. Buyers weren’t buying and sellers opted not to give their businesses away. Instead they reinvented themselves, trying new approaches, new product lines or new markets altogether.
