|
|
 |
|
|
Lifting Small Business Into The Fast Lane
ISP agents expect huge opportunities in reselling and integrating wireless
Reprinted from ChannelWEB/CRN.com
by Charlotte Dunlap
Hope springs eternal in the world of high technology.
Take, for example, the broadband connectivity market for SMB solution providers.
After facing disappointment over ISDN and avoiding the expense of leased-line deployments, solution providers say the proverbial silver lining has begun to come into view.
Say hello to DSL.
"Line costs are coming down, and the introduction of DSL is opening up [opportunity to] the world's smallest companies, which were faced with high-cost and low-speed options," says Mike Hadley, president and CEO of iCorps Technologies, Boston. "ISDN was supposed to do that, but it didn't fill in the void."
Before DSL, smaller companies looking to move beyond dial-up connectivity had to pray they had a decent ISDN service offering in their part of the country. Otherwise, they could opt for T1. But where ISDN services have remained flimsy for years, the reliability of fractional T1 lines has been overshadowed by the technology's high cost.
Integrators, too, were left stranded. How could they upgrade small customers' connectivity capabilities with so few options at their fingertips?
Now DSL opens a window of opportunity for solution providers serving SMB customers. At some point, wireless technology may open another.
"It's the anointed packet IP that's bringing increased productivity to the small guys," says John Graven, president of Computer Telephony Concepts, an integrator based in Cleveland. "For the first time in history, small businesses are taking advantage of technology that makes them leaner and meaner."
Analysts at market-research firm IDC project that worldwide deployment of Symmetric DSL (SDL), to be used primarily by businesses, will grow 338 percent from 1999 to 2000. That growth will drop to 52 percent in 2001 and 45 percent in 2002, sources say.
Carl Amdahl, CTO of F5, a solution provider in Seattle, says the broadband market is key because high bandwidth at customer sites will trip the need for a slew of other technologies and services.
"As connectivity increases, it pushes back more bandwidth requirements into the Internet infrastructure, and we all play there," says Amdahl, whose company serves mostly small businesses.
F5, he adds, focuses on providing reliable Web sites to customers.
While DSL poses one of the more promising broadband connectivity options to smaller businesses today, the technology has its flaws.
Digital Subscriber Line, which uses modems to increase the digital capacity of ordinary telephone lines, is not available everywhere. Where it is accessible, the quality of service depends largely on the condition of the existing copper and on the dis-tance between the customer and the carrier's central office.
The technology is appropriate for businesses that need constant Internet connectivity but don't rely on it for mission-critical applications, says iCorps' Hadley. The solution provider is currently integrating a few broadband technologies for one of its small-business clients, a venture capital firm that invests in healthcare companies.
Integrators are also concerned about the provisioning associated with DSL and other broadband solutions. "The ability to get IP has gone from difficult to not-well-understood by the [carriers]," Graven says. "Now their marketing departments are getting the technology out, but demand is so high that they can't make the delivery dates."
In the meantime, another competitor in the broadband space has earned itself a not-so-flattering nickname in IT circles,ISDN: I Still Don't Know. First offered in 1980, the telephone technology took more than a decade to become widespread and still doesn't enjoy the success that industry watchers thought it would.
Brad Baldwin, director of broadband technologies at IDC, says he can't explain why traditional local telephone companies sat on their hands and didn't see ISDN as an alternative to TL.
"And I can't understand why an entire geographical region doesn't do a thing about it," he adds. "In Europe, ISDN is prevalent, and in Germany the technology has saturated both businesses and residences."
Fractional T1 (FT1), another broadband alternative, allows customers to use only part of a leased T1 line but tends to be expensive, especially for small and midsize businesses, solution providers say. That's because FT1 lines generally offer more bandwidth than a small company needs.
FT1 uses a portion of a 24-channel T1 circuit. The technology is offered in increments of 64 Kbps, from two channels, or 128 Kbps, to all 24 channels, or 1.544 Mbps. A 256-Kbps FT1 can support the needs of most companies, Baldwin says.
As for cable modem technology, analysts and solution providers typically wave it off as a residential service. Baldwin says IDC's research indicates that cable modems will be used by small businesses, but mostly in the residential space.
Cable likely will come into play in the case of employees who want to connect to company servers remotely. Integrator iCorps, for example, is helping to set up cable-based remote access at the home office of one of its client's executives.
But in the next 18 to 24 months, wireless technology will begin to steal some of the broadband market's limelight, Baldwin says.
"Companies like Metro are providing wireless solutions in the Bay area. You can see a number of their antennas now," Amdahl says. "It's becoming quite popular there." But provisioning wireless worries Amdahl too, even though it's more cost-effective than traditional options such as LAN wiring.
Sources at PSINet, an ISP in Ashburn, Va., acknowledge that carriers and vendors are recognizing the value of the small-business market, no matter which broadband connectivity route solution providers opt to take. That's why they are restructuring their channel programs to support this space.
"Small and medium-size companies are absolutely the backbone of the industry. They make up the majority of our corporate customers," says Harry Brooks, channel marketing manager at PSINet. "We have a bunch of Fortune 500 companies, but it's the little guy that keeps the country going."
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
