Below is an interview with Cord Stukenberg, Director Provider Business CEE, F-Secure GmbH at CONNECTIONS EUROPE in November 2012.
What do you feel is the most important development in the connected home space in the past year?
Cloud services enter the consumer market. Basic trend of this development is multi-screen usage to save and sync your data across own devices. Moving your data between your devices usually works through the network - including a storage element to keep data present. Having been driven by OTT players, such as social networks, sharing has been more in focus at the beginning. Since becoming a mass market product, privacy and security issues raise more and more which opens opportunities for a wider scope and differentiation of offerings within cloud services. Now, most of the market players, from OTT through hardware vendors to service providers, have designed their offerings and push for market shares - even with significant media campaigns on TV. This has made cloud services a dominating topic in the market 2012.
What the biggest challenge for your company in 2013?
F-Secure has demonstrated a great track record in security, backup and storage services together with their operator partners over the past years. Being now present also with new generation of cloud storage and sync services, our greatest challenge in 2013 will be to widely establish our new Content Anywhere solution in the market.
Any other comment regarding the industry you would like to make?
Operator industry still faces strong competition and further market concentration. It gets more difficult to overcompensate price drops in access by net adds and achieve sustainable growth. Strategies follow either to upgrade access by new technologies (such as LTE) or by enrich the scope of services. However, security and quality of service remain main differentiators for the operators and keep driving other offerings on top.
