Channel Manager's Playbook - Volume 5: International Agent Opportunities

each country.” He continues: “AP- Telecom believe that a large portion of this diminished requirement will be replaced by ‘tier 2’ content providers looking to build out their own regional/ global networks.” Content providers have been making themselves felt, says Beck- ert of TeleGeography. “Content providers are the primary drivers of capacity demand on key international routes, accounting for over 70 percent of used trans-Atlantic bandwidth, and nearly 60 percent of used trans-Pacific and intra-Asian submarine cable capacity,” he points out. Content providers are seeking to push content (and cloud service instances) ever closer to end users in order to improve performance, and sometimes due to regulatory require- ments. With respect to the turning point in the market, TeleGeography projects that in 2017, content provid- ers’ networks will account for just more than 50 percent of total used in- ternational submarine cable capacity. Meanwhile, newer approaches including edge architectures might be increasingly attractive, particularly in non-critical applications where large data transfers are required. Eric Klinker, CEO and co-founder of Resilio, a company spun out of BitTor- rent in 2016, suggests, “As computing becomes cheap and ubiquitous, sys- tems at the edge of the network will become increasingly pervasive and capable, promising to unlock vast po- tential in almost every industry. “The edge is a world defined by vast computing scale and very large data currently tethered to unreliable and low capacity networks,” he continues. “The market opportunity ahead is to bridge that gap with software now and infrastructure over time to deliver game changing capa- bilities at the edge,” says Klinker. In this view, he says, soft- ware is the better answer to deliver more over the exist- ing networks with a lower capex for the telcos and a faster time to market to capture opportunities at the edge today. o Recognized as PTC, we are the global non-profit membership orga- nization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Pacific Rim, the most dynamic geography of the world, spanning more than 40 na- tions. PTC is at the nexus of two of the most important trends on the senior leadership agenda today: the rise of the networked digital society and the exponential economic growth in Asia and beyond. Learn more at ptc.org . Stephan Beckert Eric Klinker International Agents 19 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK