The world\'s telecom operators spent a combined $62 billion on outsourced services in 2008 and plan to spend even more this year, market research firm Infonetics said.
The equipment vendor services market grew 17% in 2008 and will continue to grow at a double-digit rate, Infonetics said. The bulk of this growth came from APAC operators - and India in particular.
"In the equipment vendor services market, no one sees a slowdown during this global recession; instead, they all see more opportunities," Infonetics analyst Stéphane Téral said.
The biggest telecom outsourcing cash-cows include network maintenance, application service delivery, network build, and network planning and design, Infonetics said.
The market is driven by traditional IT service providers as well as the telecom vendor integrator arms of tier 1 vendors. Major players include Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, NEC, Nokia Siemens, and Nortel.
IBM continued to lead the market in 2008, Infonetics said. But NSN was the only top five vendor to gain market share, with the rest either maintaining their market share or seeing it drop by one or two points.