Business Technology Roundtable

The transition to managed cloud services is having a trickle-down effect on various stakeholders in the business technology landscape. As an example, in the evolving enterprise communications market, customer premise equipment (CPE) vendors must confront imminent erosion in their installed base -- as cloud services gain traction across the public, private, and hybrid cloud domains. According to the latest market study by ABI Research , 41 percent of all enterprise communications users -- or 386 million lines or seats -- will be on virtual infrastructure by 2016, which is posing a serious danger to the traditional CPE market. "For CPE vendors, the cloud threat is real," says ABI senior analyst Subha Rama. "By 2016, the communications CPE market will only grow 4.3 percent, while cloud communications will grow by over 21 percent, reaching $8 billion in revenues." Smaller vendors with point solutions will see cloud services rapidly displace their installed base...