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OK, so I can’t individually send all of my potential readers a postcard. But I do still remember the excitement and anticipation of waiting to receive a postcard from a friend traveling abroad three decades ago, when I was much, much younger.

Now, 30 years later, who sends postcards? But it’s not just technology that’s changed – we have, too. We want everything now and we refuse to wait. We communicate instantly, using different means, from any location. If in the past we had only one identity, today we have multiple ones: social, professional, family, etc. And each identity has different needs and consumes different services.

Consumers (me included) now demand an incessant flow of ever-new communication and entertainment services, all of which must be top quality. But are service providers actually prepared to support this market dynamic?

Three years ago, Amdocs commissioned an independent research project to carry out a detailed analysis of the challenges around time to market for products and services. We are now revisiting this topic and we have unearthed some pretty interesting findings after interviewing 125 senior executives at wireless, wireline and cable providers from every region in the world.

In 2008, 59 percent of those interviewed described time to market as “very important.” That number jumped to 70 percent in 2011.

Amdocs’ new eBook, “What’s stopping you from increasing your time to market?”, explains that the increased emphasis on time to market has been driven by customer demand for new services and the pressure on service providers to remain competitive and profitable:

• 68% of service providers in the 2011 survey cited speed of new product creation as a key business differentiator
• 95% stated that fast time to market has a positive impact on revenue
• 95% reported time to market as impacting brand image and 91% said it helps achieve customer loyalty.

Service providers who fail to improve time to market therefore risk customer churn and missed revenue opportunities. Stay tuned for further blog posts on this topic – you might even be tempted to send your friends a postcard about them!