Week in research: Managed services revenues climb; MSOs try out onscreen apps

Managed services' star rises: Businesses in the United States will continue to spend more on managed services for telecommunications and IT, says Insight Research, with a CAGR of 12 percent predicted over the next five years. And one driving reason for the shift into the cloud is the ongoing recession, as enterprises find that shifting their IT and communications requirements to a third-party provider is a cost-effective alternative to internal staffing. Revenues associated with the managed services market--including managed data center services, managed infrastructure, managed LAN services, managed WAN services and managed mobility services--are expected to grow from $29 billion to $47 billion by 2015. News release.

China drives PON growth: Telecom operators in China will be key factors in expanding PON (passive optical networks), according to the Dell'Oro Group's latest quarterly access report. The market saw record revenues of $800 million in Q4 2010, with Huawei the leading GPON vendor followed by Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson--who also recorded a substantial portion of their GPON revenues in China. News release.

MSOs jump into apps craze: On-screen apps are gaining favor with cable operators looking to expand their available options to keep subscribers, a trend that points to cable's continuing interest in "exploiting OTT platforms and migrating to IP video delivery," Heavy Reading Cable Industry Insider reports. MSOs including Time Warner Cable and Comcast promoted TV Everywhere apps on Samsung devices at the recent CES 2011. However, a key factor holding back large-scale development of such applications is content rights issues, currently roiling on several fronts. News release.