With economic uncertainty continuing to influence activity around the globe, operators and equipment manufacturers need to identify the areas that will be healthy in the future and make smart investments.
Maury Mechanick, counsel at White & Case, likens the pursuit of a particular market to betting on a particular horse: “If you place a bet you want to make sure you win.” The best places to place bets today: enterprise video, mobility, broadband and emerging markets.
Video continues its pervasive march from our daily lives into the business world, and as this march continues, this shift toward video will be important for the satellite communications sector. “Historically, training has been instructor-led and it was broadcast live,” says Sampath Ramaswami, senior director, strategic development, Hughes Network Systems. “We have seen a shift to more asynchronous training, with more YouTube-like video clips which are played on demand.” Ramaswami also notes that more customers are requesting upstream video applications (remote location to headquarters) for surveillance, where in the past video exclusively was a downstream application (headquarters to remote locations).
In the past, video networks had their own equipment and were not thought of as being part of the communications network, says Brett Belinsky, strategy director for Arqiva Satellite & Media. “With the development of IP-based networks, that has all changed now.”
Greg Pelton, general manager of the Cisco IRIS (Internet Routing in Space) program, highlights video’s growing importance in enterprise networks and the effect it will have on carriers. “There is a huge demand for video in the enterprise, and this trend will continue as business people expect to see things remotely. Almost any business meeting you attend these days has a video component. The use of collaborative systems is growing quickly. The use of video basically changes how you interact with others in any organization,” he says. “Corporate networks have all shifted to IP but video is still difficult to support due to unpredictable demand. Architecting a network is very challenging. Cisco is trying to get ahead of these needs but is making sure you will meeting your security policies,” says Pelton.
On-the-Go Demands
Mobility applications are another hot topic, and customers are demanding mobility solutions anywhere on the globe. “End users now have an expectation of being able to move from place to place and have access to their [enterprise resource planning applications], regardless of their locations,” Pelton says.
David Myers, executive vice president and general manager, CapRock Government Solutions, echoes the growing demand for higher bandwidth mobility solutions, pointing out that many clients outgrow the limited bandwidth provided by MSS solutions. “Our clients have requested an upgrade path that provides a sustained data rate and an economical cost per bit transmitted. In addition to being mobile, our clients want to bring video from remote sites, and upstream video is becoming an important application. The military needs to send back high quality video from their UAVs. The energy industry wants the same sort of real-time video capabilities from [unmanned submersibles] which operate near the ocean floor thousands of feet below the surface,” he says.
Crew morale and retention also are important challenges in the maritime market, and Belinsky points out that digital rights management issues will become an increasingly important aspect of maritime mobility solutions. In-flight entertainment is another growing aspect within the greater discussion on mobility, and Belinsky predicts that fewer media-rich applications, such as featured movies, will be downloaded to airplanes. In-flight Internet access will lead to the decline in the number of movies downloaded by the airlines for in-cabin entertainment.
Koby Zontag, director of sales and business development for RRSat Global Communications Network Ltd., agrees with the importance of mobility applications, pointing out that his company recently invested in a new Inmarsat terminal. “Service providers will need to provide broadband mobility applications if you want to serve this market, especially military customers.”
Pelton summed up the potential inherent in the mobility market, “Wi-Fi and cell phones have ushered in an era of mobility, and, ultimately, customers want these types of services regardless whether it is cellular or satellite. The expectation is that when I move from place to place my ERP application will work the same no matter where I go.”
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