The Yankee Group reports that the Western European data services market is stuck in the slow lane with growth rates hardly reaching 2%. In contrast, broadband access grows in importance, increasing to half the total corporate data revenue. In the recent report: ‘European Corporate Data Market: Still Stuck in the Slow Lane’, Yankee Group assesses how service providers are navigating between the dangers and opportunities of the European corporate data market. Based on in-depth interviews of buyers and sellers of corporate  data services, Yankee Group provides insight into total market size and  forecasts growth for the top 10 Western Europe economies corporate data  markets—Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain,  Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom—as well as European IP VPN and Ethernet markets.

Yankee Group’s key findings include:
By 2009, business DSL will account for 46% of Western European enterprise data revenue (defined as the aggregate of corporate data and business broadband).
Revenue from IP VPN and Ethernet services will account for 56% of corporate data revenue by 2009.
In 2007, the transition to non-traditional-based services will be complete in seven out of Europe ’s top 10 economies.

“Broadband, Ethernet and IP VPN should be the focus for services providers within the corporate data market; however, they will attract the highest competition,” said Tony Marson, Yankee Group, senior analyst, Telecommunication Strategies Europe. “To compete successfully, service providers need to clearly define customer requirements through deep segmentation, develop innovative data products to increase revenue and margins, and then focus on up-selling to the current customer base prior to new customer acquisition.”

The crossover point, in terms of the non-traditional services becoming the dominant revenue type, is sometime in 2006. This is true for all of the top countries in EMEA with the exception of Sweden and the UK where non-traditional data networking revenue is already dominant. For the UK, Yankee Group expects the crossover point to be this year, while in Sweden , non-traditional services were the dominant revenue stream since 2004 onward - further emphasising the maturity of the non-traditional data services market.
www.yankeegroup.com