Week in research: Multimedia mobile services to drive IMS growth; SMBs like cloud-based storage

IMS growth driven by mobile services: With service providers like Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and China Telecom actually leveraging IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in their networks, it's clear that the early hype over the concept is a distant memory. A new Infonetics study, "IMS Services Strategies, Product Features, and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey," revealed that the use of IMS continues to shift to the wireless industry. Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research, noted that "78 percent of our respondents will have a mobile-specific service such as mobile messaging, VoLTE (voice over LTE), RCS (Rich Communication Service), and/or VoIP over 3G by 2013, up from 35 percent today." Release

Infonetics top 3 IMS drivers

2011 a big year for business communications spending: While the world's economy, particularly on the employment front, continues to lag, enterprises are starting to spend more on IT and telecom services. In-Stat Research illustrates that spending on telecom services, including cloud computing, wireless, wireline voice, wireline data, and business IP/VoIP, will increase by 6 percent this year. "There will be positive growth across all 20 verticals with education and healthcare and social services leading the surge with growth of 10 percent and 9 percent respectively," says Greg Potter, Analyst, adding that the only segment that wireline voice, not surprisingly, "will decline by about half a percent." Release

China to lead the FTTX market: China's insatiable appetite for high bandwidth-based content and services is driving the region's major carriers, including China Telecom, to continue building out Fiber to the X, including Fiber to the Home (FTTH) services to their subscribers. A new Ovum report argues that Chinese market will reach 100 million subscribers by 2016, which will then represent more than 50 percent of the world's fiber subscribers. And while household penetration of FTTX is only at 4 percent, or about 20 million people, by the end of Q1 2011 this figureincreased to over 22 million. Article

SMBs like cloud-based storage: Cloud storage is no longer just a big enterprise play. Seeing the opportunity to offload nonessential functions that they don't have the technical staff to manage, SMBs are adopting cloud-based storage services. AMI Research's new "U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook" confirms such a trend. One of the insights the new study revealed was that 31 percent of the one million U.S. SMBs using hosted storage have a large amount of mobile workers in the field, like sales reps, that need to transfer data from their smartphones to the headquarters site. A growing number of "U.S. SMBs are moving to the cloud to enhance existing packaged applications, such as CRM databases," said Nichelle Grannum, Survey Research Analyst at AMI. Release