We are halfway through the first quarter of 2017—how have some of the biggest industry and telecom trends shaped your plans for the remainder of the year? I spoke with members of our carrier services team to talk top trends for this year. Here is what they said:

Theresa Vernon—Senior Account Manager

“There are several technologies in the carrier services space that are top priorities for 2017. Businesses are increasingly inquiring about how to craft an SD-WAN strategy and roadmap. It’s imperative they look to providers with extensive partner relationships to support a full range of solutions for optimal business outcomes. Next, everyone is buzzing about the cloud—which isn’t right for every business. Looking at cloud options through different lenses—security, compliance, control, as well as operational functions—will help create the best solution for your business. Lastly, consider a risk-free “Telco Assessment” to help identify waste, increase efficiency and reduce costs—as much as 10 percent to 30 percent.”

Ready to implement some of these technologies into your own business? Schedule a complimentary consultation today.

Adam Sugarman—Solutions Area Manager

“I think the trends in telecom are dictated by organizations’ most pressing IT initiatives. You can look at cloud-based applications like Office 365 as an example; if businesses do not make certain that they have the necessary bandwidth to support a deployment, the user experience will suffer and fixing the problem instantly becomes a top priority. Addressing connectivity issues is particularly important for IT because its reputation throughout the rest of the organization will likely suffer if user experiences are poor.”

Amy Senese—Senior Account Manager

“Having multiple Internet connections is becoming more relevant as clients are migrating applications/services to the cloud.  If the primary Internet connection goes down, employees cannot be productive and business comes to a halt. This is a simple concept, but it’s one that is often overlooked. This need for redundancy makes it imperative that any partner that an organization leverages for telecom services can sell and implement diverse carrier options.”

A High Level View

As you might have guessed, many of the other members of our team provided responses that hit on some of these same topics. The central theme that ran through all of the team’s answers was that telecom is more closely linked with technology initiatives than ever before. As a result, carriers are offering innovative new features and functionality created, either directly or indirectly, to support various IT projects. What that means is that is that for IT leaders to be most effective, they need to stay on top of these new offerings.

• carrier, 
• data center, 
• Office 365, 
• SDWAN, 
• telecom