Over the last several years, there have been many changes in the way corporations work and run their businesses. One department that has seen a lot of changes is a company’s telecommunications structure. The maturity of Voice over IP (VoIP), WebRTC, along with the idea of employees being able to bring their own devices (BYOD) to work, has dramatically affected what Information and communications technology (ICT) services buyers require.

Ovum, an independent analyst and consultancy firm headquartered in London, which specializes in global coverage of IT and telecommunications industries, recently released the results of a survey whose respondents included over 500 multinational corporations (MNCs). This report is based on Ovum’s survey concerning enterprise insights of ICT decision-makers and influencers.

The report is designed to provide analysis of CIOs’ and telecoms managers’ ratings of their primary telecoms operators, where these operators are suppliers of global ICT services. Essentially, the results show that ICT services buyers and not satisfied with their global telecoms service providers with respect to network performance and customer support. In fact, the bottom line is that they now expect much more from their providers.

David Molony, who is principal analyst at Ovum, made the following comments, “Our research highlights the challengers’ achievements, and we feel it sends a particularly strong message to the big six. Global service providers in the telecoms industry should be treating existing contracts as if they are in continuous competitive tender. They should be looking to improve overall service performance across a range of criteria, and not just to address or improve on shortcomings.”

The big six that Molony mentions refers to what is considered to be the top six telecoms with dedicated global enterprise services. These include AT&T, BT, Orange, T-Systems, Verizon, and Vodafone. Some of the smaller companies that are currently challenging the big six are Easynet, Interoute, Level 3, Tata Communications, and Telstra.

Ovum’s survey found that the effective operation and management of an efficient, reliable and secure global network tops the list as the most important thing that MNC users want from their telecoms suppliers. The survey also rated how all of the telecoms mentioned above satisfied their customers’ needs.

Probably the most interesting result was the fact that the big six basically scored one point higher than the smaller and startup providers. According to Ovum, out of a possible score of 200, the big six achieved an average performance rating of 105 in global services, as compared to an average score of 104 for all other service providers.

A few of the questions that the respondents were asked to consider resulted in the following replies:

• The effective operation and management of an efficient, reliable and secure global network is still by a distance the most important thing that MNC users want from their telecoms suppliers. Yet even the top-scoring telco service providers scored poorly on criteria such as problem resolution, geographic coverage, and delivery to SLAs.
• The big six need to improve in account management, co-innovation with customers and delivering value for money, three areas in which their customers gave these suppliers their lowest scores.
• Challengers such as Easynet, Interoute, Level 3, Tata Communications and Telstra recorded some high scores, rewarding their investment efforts in customer service organizations and advanced networking.

Oddly, it seems that some of the big six providers are quite content with their ratings. Does this mean that they do not intend to provide additional network performance and customer support? Does this mean that the new companies emerging will have a better opportunity to work with MNCs? It seems that Ovum’s survey produced more questions than answers.