Self-Provisioning Services Begin to Impact Enterprise Buying Patterns

Traditional enterprise telecom buying has been predominantly restricted to major Tier 1 carriers (AT&T, Sprint, MCI). With the growing market in auto provisioning software and outsourced provisioning services, users are finally looking at tiered buying, using safer (more costly) Tier 1 carriers for business critical traffic and Tier 2 (or 3) carriers for non-critical communications (where the cost savings for similar services can be up to 30%). Making moves, adds and changes (MAC) easier and quicker, the autoprovisioning market is creating more competition among carriers for "generic" bandwidth. Users can also use autoprovisioning to jump over poor service problems by simply replacing problem circuits and carriers.