Insight

At TNC, we love nothing more than bursting the hype bubble around a topic and helping our customers make evidence-based decisions that deliver value, without being swayed by marketing and oversell.One of the most persistent hype bubbles in the market at the moment is that “SD-WAN will replace MPLS”, and it’s a bubble we get to burst on a regular basis. Let’s be clear – SD-WAN is a very interesting technology that has lots of promise for the future, as well as having some valuable use cases today.However, the idea that SD-WAN must…

Network transformation involves change across every aspect of the network – technology, provider, service and operating model, commercials, and contracts. Add to this that the network is increasingly becoming a fundamental component of the business operation; it is clear that the development of a network transformation strategy is an important initiative now being considered at the board level.

So it’s finally happened - the UK has its first 5G network up and running. EE launched its 5G network in 6 cities on 30th May. First out of the blocks and thus receiving a lot of media attention, even making the main TV news programmes and with ongoing governmental uncertainty around Huawei, mobile is receiving more mainstream media attention than it has for a long time. But, beneath these headlines, what has TNC witnessed as a first reaction to 5G?Well, it’s fast and fast – both throughput and latency are materially better than 4G but are…

With significant global growth predicted over the next three years, UCaaS and SD-WAN are two of the hottest and most interesting technologies in the telecoms market right now. Through our many customer engagements and vendor interactions, The Network Collective has developed excellent market insight in relation to the key strategic considerations when designing an SD-WAN to support UCaaS. The objective of this whitepaper is to present an overview of the key strategic considerations for organisations when designing and sourcing SD-WAN to support…

This paper examines the anticipated trends over the next few years as well as revisiting past papers to understand what has happened to TNC’s previous predictions and how these items have developed, changed, or disappeared.

When TNC first surveyed the market for network operating and management strategies in 2010, 88% of companies bought outsourced managed services from telecoms service providers, and half of those who didn’t intended to move in that direction. In other words almost 95% of organisations sourced or intended to source networks this way.

In the incredibly fast-moving world of network and telecoms, it’s easy to focus on the huge technology changes that are shaping our industry – from SDWAN to CCaaS to 5G. I should know – we at TNC spend a tremendous amount of our time looking at the opportunities these new technologies create for our customers, and we’ve written some really interesting white papers on our vision for the future e.g. WAN of the FutureHowever, it’s vital that we don’t lose sight of a simpler trend that is of huge importance to many organisations and…

Over recent years, the marketplace for WAN services has been in continuous flux, moving from a near-universal dependence on MPLS to a market offering a range of solutions which still includes MPLS, but where there are now many other options, with SDx top of many organisations’ agendas. However, as TNC has been saying for some time, the debate over adoption of SDx doesn’t grasp the full paradigm shift that software-based networks will allow.

As a strategy consultant I often get asked questions from our customers like ‘how do we make the experience of our service both measurable and insightful?’ or ‘how do we embed client satisfaction as part of our SLA?’.As we all know, a good SLA is designed to provide a level of assurance in relation to an overall service or specific service parameter such as availability, performance, time to repair etc. SLAs are critical in network and telecoms contracts as these types of services are often susceptible to performance issues and faults which…

Until recently, most organisations considering the future of their networks talked about “migration” and /or “enhancements”. However, over the last 12-24 months, more and more organisations are talking about “transformation”. So, what’s the difference, why the change, and, most importantly, what must you do to truly transform your network?

Over the past 12 months TNC has seen many of its customers start to consider migrating from a traditional telco or on-premise Contact Centre solution in favour of a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution believing that this could dynamically scale to support increased call volumes and deliver new customer engagement channels and capabilities.

Long before SD-WAN came into the market, replacing MPLS access circuits with locally-procured Internet access circuits has been a method used to reduce costs for international WAN networks. As we discussed in our last white paper A buyer’s guide to SD-WAN there has been much hype around SD-WAN cost benefits and our paper analysed the reality of this as well as setting out other expectations.

IT leaders tasked with developing and implementing a strategy for network and telecoms will face greater challenges in 2019 than perhaps ever before, and the reason for this is the major disruption underway in the market. For many years, demand for enterprise network and telecoms services has been relatively straightforward, and these relatively straightforward needs were met by a relatively small number of service providers using a pretty standardised model. However, that cosy model has been unravelling for some time, and the unravelling is set…

With over 68 million keyword results returned by Google, the term “SD WAN” sure is a topic people are interested in learning about. As an independent subject matter expert in the networks and telecoms market it’s very much a topic which interests us too. So, what is all the hype about, who is buying it, how are they sourcing it, what lessons were learnt during the delivery life cycle, and most importantly does it deliver any benefit?

Everywhere we go customers are asking about 5G, but the questions betray not just excitement about a new technology that may have far-reaching benefits, but also uncertainty as to its relevance. The principal benefits have been much lauded in the press and obviously speed is the most eye-catching, with expectations of at least a gigabit per second and potentially up to 20Gb/s (of course there are caveats to those figures and on lower frequencies the speed may not be much better than the top end current 4G experience). Other key benefits include…

SD-WAN has grown in maturity over the last 12 to 18 months, with sizable acquisitions and investment from the likes of Cisco and VMware, an influx of new SD-WAN managed services and cloud providers, and productisation of various flavours of SD-WAN by almost all major telcos.The growing maturity is also driving enhanced capability with many vendors and MSPs now developing their solutions to incorporate enhanced security controls equivalent to that of a next generation firewall.So, is now the right to time to make the move to SD-WAN?As the true value…

TNC recently published a white paper asking whether the time has come to ditch landlines – it’s a great paper and I highly recommend you read it. However, ditching landlines is only part of the story – the narrative for most organisations’ telephony strategy over the next 3-5 years is blending together fragments to create a cohesive whole.Firstly, why? Well, there are powerful drivers behind the fragmentation of voice, all of which come under the umbrella of new ways of working – the increasing need for collaboration, the…

Many customers have asked us over the years whether they really need fixed line telephony, but what started as a “blue sky” question five years ago is an increasingly common topic of discussion. Through this white paper, TNC tackles this topic head on – what does it mean to go “landline free”, why are organisations considering it, does it save money, and what costs and benefits can it deliver?