AT&T (NYSE: T) believes that business telecom service spending will continue to improve.
Speaking at this week's Barclays Capital 2010 Global Communications, Media & Technology Conference in New York City, Ron Spears, CEO of Business Solutions, believes that business spending is beginning to stabilize. "If current trends hold, we would like to think headwinds we've seen will start to abate," he said.
In the most recent quarter, the star performer in AT&T Business solutions was, not surprisingly, IP-based services. During Q1, AT&T reported that IP-based data services grew 5.5 percent, led by 16.7 percent growth in VPN revenues.
What's making Spears confident about his unit's future prospects is the increased integration of mobile offerings into its business service suite. A particular growth engine for business mobility will be Machine to Machine (M2M), a service that connects everything from electric meters to hospital IV bottles to a wireless connection. AT&T, which has been providing M2M services to vertical segments such as utilities and health care through its emerging devices unit, expects to produce 20 million M2M connections by 2011.
Along with M2M, Spears said he's seeing more businesses adopt Apple's iPhone, a device they view "as a mobile computer."
For more:
- Wall Street Journal via Dow Jones has this article
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