Market research firm Infonetics Research has released the 2010 edition of its Optical Network Hardware in EMEA: Europe, Middle East, and Africa report.
"While Alcatel-Lucent is the market share leader for the overall EMEA region, Huawei is the leader in every sub-region except Western Europe," the report's authors say, adding that Huawei is "especially well positioned in the fastest growing sub-region, Central and Eastern Europe."
Andrew Schmitt, Infonetics Research's directing analyst for optical, said that Infonetics forecasts a 12 percent revenue gain for the EMEA optical network hardware market in 2010 over 2009, "led by incumbent telco investment."
And over the long term, growth in the EMEA optical network hardware market will be driven by a spending recovery in Western Europe, access network deployments in the Middle East, strong growth in metro WDM for wireless backhaul in Central and Eastern Europe and a shift toward WDM and away from SDH in Africa.
Read more here.
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We'll let you in on a little secret here: All this talk your techies throw around about "cloud" this and that, then look at you, grin and keep talking? It's not really that tough.
The cloud is "a set of services and technologies that enable the delivery of computing services over the Internet in real-time, allowing end-users instant access to data and applications from any device with Internet access," according to a summary on Novell.
Basically what that means is that the actual computers you're accessing your information from aren't located in your building, but the ones you're connected to via the Internet.
Read more here.
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Microsoft's search engine, Bing, will now "pull up the latest updates from Facebook and Twitter on your search terms," according to industry observer Lance Whitney.
Tech News Daily cites Bing Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi as saying Bing Social "is the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose with non-pages content."
Mehdi "talked about the value of recommendations from friends and contacts on consumer decision-making," Tech News Daily reported: "Bing search will now include social data from both Twitter and Facebook on its homepage and on search results pages."
The Register notes that it's "unclear how much Microsoft will be paying for the privilege of switching on Facebook's stream of Web2.0rhea. The software maker has of course already sunk $240 million into Zuckerberg's stalker empire, which gave Steve Ballmer's firm a mere 1.6 percent of preferred Facebook stock."
Read more here.
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A recent piece written for Alcatel-Lucent by Willem Verbiest discusses multiscreen's "multiple opportunities," kicking off with the observation that "consumer demand for multimedia is exploding. It is no longer confined to the home TV and has become pervasive across devices in both fixed and mobile telecom networks."
In fact, Verbiest says, "research suggests that by 2014 video will become the dominant source of global telecom traffic."
Naturally this leads to the desire for constant content anywhere and on any screen. Two major trends are influencing this desire, Verbiest sees: "The emergence of Internet video content and the growth of multimedia-enabled consumer equipment devices."
Read more here.
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A recent article by John Dillon for Alcatel-Lucent suggests that not only can operators monetize multimedia services by selectively exposing high value network capabilities, but service provider network assets offer quantifiable value to third-party developers.
"Service provider returns, previously provided by investments in communications and services, are diminishing," Dillon notes, since "an increase in traffic volume driven by multimedia consumption and direct-to-consumer application services is eroding service provider value."
Service providers can increase their influence on the content delivery value chain, Dillon thinks, by "adding unique value to it." Specifically, he sees marketing opportunities in a few areas.
Multimedia content delivery, such as on-demand and catch-up TV, and video on demand. Screen Digest reports that in the pay-TV sector, "the upgrade of the U.S. cable companies' networks to enable homes to on-demand, combined with migration of customers from analogue to digital services will see the transactional VoD market increase in value in North America to $3 billion by 2014."
Read more here.
