What Enterprise Customers Really Want
The enterprise customer is the most attractive yet elusive for the satellite service provider
by Robert Bell
New York, NY, September 2, 2011- The satellite communications market is a stool standing on three legs. There is the media and entertainment leg, for which satellite provides a uniquely cost-effective, one-to-many solution. There is the government and military leg, where satellite’s primary advantage is its ability to go places where terrestrial alternatives are unreliable or nonexistent. And there is the enterprise leg, serving all other kinds of organizations. Of the three legs of the stool, the enterprise market is in some ways the most attractive but also the most elusive.
According a new report from WTA, What Customer Want, enterprise customers are attractive because they want the most integrated, high-value package of services that they can buy. This is not a group that wants to carve up the package and buy components to save money. “You could definitely de-bundle it,” said one executive interviewed for the report, “and negotiate down the price on the different pieces. Would it be worth it? When you have multiple fingers in the pot, there is a bunch of finger-pointing when things go wrong. Then you have to manage the children in the sandbox. With a single vendor, the management workload for us is streamlined.”
It is also a “sticky” set of customers. They are typically buying satellite to go places where alternatives don’t exist, from oil wells to ships at sea, or because a single satellite infrastructure allows them to connect thousands of locations without the nightmare of having to deal with hundreds of telecom vendors.
But they are hard to find. Rather than being part of large distribution or communications groups, they are the lonely few in their organizations who understand what satellite can do.
And they also have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the technology and services on which they depend. They would like to have a lot more capacity for the same price they are paying today. They are increasingly frustrated by latency, because applications increasingly demand interactivity. And they want their satellite vendors to deliver greater flexibility and value. “Today, we deploy a VSAT and run individual services over it, but we want a package deal where it all comes together when required,” said another interviewee. “We are proof-testing a VoIP system using satellite and MPLS over fiber where the intelligence is located at the teleport and the end nodes. They adapt automatically as we add, change and remove network nodes and applications. We need to see a great deal more of that.”
The director of systems operations for a major US retail chain reported that rising bandwidth demands had led him to switch from a pure satellite network to a hybrid satellite/broadband solution – fortunately from the same vendor. “Our network connects restaurants to our internal portal for email, point-of-sale processing at the start and end of the day, distribution of security updates to PCs. That portal has become a hefty application, and we really couldn’t support it purely over satellite.”
But the good news is that the simplicity and reliability of satellite keeps it in the dominant role in this particular. “At any given time, the DSL connection at 20 to 25 of our 490 restaurants is down, and they have to depend entirely on the satellite link.”
What Customers Want: Enterprise 2011is available free to WTA members and for sale to non-members from the WTA Web site at http://www.worldteleport.org/.
------------------------------------------
Robert Bell is Executive Director of the World Teleport Association, which represents the world's most innovative teleport operators, carriers and technology providers in 20 nations. He can be reached at: rbell@worldteleport.org
