SAO PAULO, Brazil – February 23, 2015 – Ultra broadband services and enterprise mobility applications are expected to drive telecommunications spending in Brazil. In the meantime, traditional voice services will become commoditized and companies will migrate to Internet protocol (IP) telephony to reduce costs. Already, approximately 50.2 percent of companies from the corporate and small and medium business (SMB) segments are using voice over IP (VoIP)/IP private branch exchange (PBX). However, 20.8 percent of companies said that they are not currently employing VoIP/IP PBX but would hire it to reduce telecommunications costs.
A new customer research study from Frost & Sullivan, Strategic Analysis of the Brazilian Companies Investments in ICT, summarizes the findings from 313 interviews conducted with Brazilian companies to understand the current adoption of and interest in various information and communication technologies (ICT) solutions.
For more information on this study, please email Francesca Valente, Corporate Communications, at francesca.valente@frost.com.
Approximately half the interviewed companies have made the internally used Wi-fi available for customer use. This trend points to the need for telecommunication providers to bundle Internet services with other ICT products.
Wi-fi is as important in the SMB segment as it is in the larger corporate segment. Fiber and dedicated Internet will be crucial to maintain robust adoption rates in Brazil, even though some SMBs rely on broadband, as it is more affordable and some providers are boosting the quality of these services.
Telecommunications companies are innovating in terms of sales channels to reach SMBs. Until now, door-to-door sales, sales agents and online stores have been among the media used to increase the sale of fixed telephony lines and other IT services.
“In Brazil, it is important for SMBs to have a fixed telephony line to build credibility with customers and foster financial relationships with banks and suppliers,” said Frost & Sullivan ICT Research Analyst Carina Gonçalves. “For this reason as well as the availability of bundles that combine mobile enterprise solutions, infrastructure-as-a-service, tablets, and point-of-sale solutions, the fixed telephony market is still a lucrative segment.”
With connection through traditional fixed lines or mobile data, 83.7 percent of Brazilian companies subscribe to electronic security and monitoring services. These companies also rely on mobile machine-to-machine connections for both primary connection and backup purposes.
In addition, around 68.4 percent of Brazilian companies have more than 21 corporate mobile telephony lines. Among large companies, however, demand has reached a point of saturation. If carriers reach out to mid-management employees with hybrid/control plans that allow unlimited usage during working hours and paid usage in leisure hours, they will still find opportunities in the large-company space.
Of all the enterprise mobility applications, corporate email is the most widely used. In preparation for the future, 27.8 percent of the interviewed companies have hired mobile device management solutions, which are necessary to cope with the bring-your-own-device trend.
Conspicuously, 59.7 percent of Brazilian companies would not hire any enterprise mobility application, as they do not think it to be relevant for their business model. Telecommunication companies are looking to offer integrated solutions to optimize the adoption of mobile enterprise services by small, medium and large businesses.
“As fierce competition pervades the Brazilian ICT market, operators are providing unlimited voice plans for on-net calls and aggressive discounts for off-net calls to retain clients,” noted Gonçalves. “To survive in this new environment, value-added services act as crucial differentiators and reinforce the need for consolidation in the telecommunications market.”
Strategic Analysis of the Brazilian Companies Investments in ICT is part of the IT Services Growth Partnership Service program. Frost & Sullivan’s related studies include: Latin American Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure Outsourcing Services Market, Machine-to-machine Communications Market, and Latin American Managed Security Services Market. All studies included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants.
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