Success in a Hyper-Connected World Requires Global Connectivity
Recapping Hughes 2020 Analyst Day
In spite of (and because of) the need to work remotely and engage virtually, 2020 was a big year for Hughes. It saw our core services and agility enlisted like never before as customers needed to respond swiftly to unforeseen and overnight changes in their businesses. No matter their location around the globe, each enterprise’s ability to succeed hinged on connectivity.
The year was also significant for Hughes in terms of our analyst relations. Our teams were able to engage with a host of new firms, strengthen our connections with existing associates and friends, and participate in a wide range of industry surveys and reports. These efforts culminated in a highly successfully Analyst Day, held in October, with participation from 20 analysts at 12 different firms. I and my Hughes colleagues presented highlights from the year, alongside our partners, Fortinet’s Jonathan Nguyen and VMware’s Rick Geehan, and one of our long-time, valued customers, Richard Morris from OneMain Financial. Here’s a recap from that day’s sessions.
A Focus on Managed Services and Artificial Intelligence
Two key themes emerged from the year: a changing Managed Services market and the important role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in addressing these changes. In our Enterprise market, which is concentrated on large, distributed organizations with 100 or more locations, we’ve seen a growing interest in Managed Services. This stems from companies seeking to move more quickly, offload network complexity, and focus on their essential business drivers for success.
Within this evolving market is an emerging emphasis on issues related to automation, integration, security, the Cloud, managed connectivity, visibility, and of course, the remote workforce. These factors are creating more demand for solutions that span the areas of multi-vendor approaches, WAN/LAN convergence, API-driven overlays, SASE (secure access service edge), and co-management models. Consequently, there are also new entrants to the market and a more competitive environment.
Amid these changes, Hughes customers are continuing to stress their desire to partner with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) that will provide peace of mind and trusted support. Their expectation is for us to address complexity, offer skilled resources, and deliver standardization and automation across their sites and technical environment. They want innovative solutions that deliver much-needed capabilities, and they want them quickly. But their chief priority is how all of it improves their own customers’ experience. Our primary offerings, which emphasize traditional network services, along with our added value and new edge services meet both their needs and expectations.
The most significant value add service recently delivered by Hughes is our deployment of AI for IT operations (AIOps), which has been provided as part of our core network and used across 32,000 managed sites, as part of our HughesON™ Managed Network Services. We use AIOps to predict and “self-heal” network anomalies that can cause service disruption, with roughly 70% of cases being corrected automatically. The remaining 30% of cases are typically escalated for resolution. This type of proactive network monitoring corrective action contributes to our customers’ network uptime and peace of mind.
Hughes Commitment to Care
Hughes has been in business for nearly 50 years, yet we always value industry recognition. It validates our long-term commitment to care about our culture, technology, customers, and vendors.
This year, we were honored to be ranked #2 on Vertical Systems Leaderboard for Managed SD-WAN market share; and ranked #3 on the Frost & Sullivan Radar Report on Managed SD-WAN for growth and market share performance. In November, Gartner published its report on Critical Capabilities for Managed Network Services in which Hughes scored the highest in each of the five use cases cited. In addition, Gartner named Hughes a Challenger in its November 2020 Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services.
This commitment to care is in our DNA, regardless of what year it may be. As we turn our sights to 2021, Hughes looks forward to maintaining momentum across all these areas and finding new and improved ways to support customers and their business needs.