Connected cars represent an exciting evolution for consumers, car manufacturers and mobile operators alike. There are already over one billion cars on the world’s roads today, according to research firm Ward’s Auto, and that number is expected to continue growing as more consumers in emerging markets get onto the roads. Automotive manufacturers have already put plans into action to ensure, that in the coming years, the majority of new cars will be equipped with broadband connectivity.

It’s been a year for serious cloud investments and networking specialist Cisco has closed out 2012 with a $1.2bn outlay on privately held cloud management company Meraki.

Having missed the 3G boat, Cisco is attempting to make an impression in the telco space by using its IP expertise to cash in on the migration to endto- end IP architecture brought in with LTE. At the same time, however, specialist telecom equipment providers are developing their own ‘Cisco killer’ switching infrastructure.

We want to know what you are thinking.

Our readers are the people shaping the industry; negotiating its obstacles, managing its challenges and creating its successes. What you believe about the state of your industry, and the near-term future that awaits it, offers some of the most valuable insight in the market.

The survey will be wide reaching in scope, designed to gauge the status of the industry from one side to the other. The BCN and telecoms.com editorial team will turn the raw data from the survey into a series of reports and features that will be published on telecoms.com and in Mobile Communications International magazine.

We’ll hold a mirror up to the industry, show it how it looks at itself, where it is succeeding and where it thinks it might be going wrong.

To thank you for your valuable time, everybody who completes the survey will receive a free copy of the report and will automatically be entered into our prize draw with two new Apple iPads up for grabs. The more of our readers who fill out the survey – the more accurate reflection we can give! The winners will to be announced at Mobile World Congress 2013.

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With traditional network architectures struggling to cope with more dynamic applications and services, software-defined networking (SDN) provides the answer to operators’ challenges, according to research firm Ovum. The company believes SDN will be key in enabling future networks to become more flexible, scalable and intelligent.

Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has announced it will use local infrastructure vendor Ericsson’s Connected Vehicle Cloud solution in order to allow drivers, passengers and the car to connect to services available in the cloud.

Citing its previous infrastructure as being expensive to run and time consuming to maintain Orange Digital, which manages the online portals for EE, has moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The firm claims that by moving to Amazon’s cloud, it is better able to support spikes in traffic and capacity and reduce costs by £2m over a three-year period.

The African enterprise space may be in the nascent stages of development, but it’s time has certainly come. A new stream, Enterprise ICT Africa, made its appearance at AfricaCom this year, putting a strong focus on the opportunities for cloud services in the region.

As many of the industry’s thought leaders have advised, Africa is in a good position to generate opportunities where other more developed regions have failed. On the opening day Camille Mendler, principal analyst and head of enterprise verticals at Informa Telecoms & Media, called for new segmentation methods for the market in order to capitalise on contextual opportunities. In this case, Mendler believes there is a significant opportunity for cloud services in the ‘long tail’, the blue collar market and micro-businesses.

Last week’s Big Data World Congress delivered a number of important messages, but none more so than the sentiment provided by Lastminute.com’s Director of Innovation, Bill Beckler, who reminded the data-hungry delegates in attendance that getting the most out of analytics isn’t just about number crunching – it’s about human interaction too.

An organisation founded in 2010 to define the future of Linux on low power mobile chips from ARM has won support from social networking giant Facebook.

Telefónica Digital is bolstering its global public cloud service with a toolkit that offers users greater control and provisioning of virtual servers.

Dubbed ‘Instant Servers’, which sounds like something created by adding a spoonful of granules to a mug of hot water, the service is based on technology from Joyent, which allows customers to configure the size of their virtual server in terms of RAM memory, CPU and hard drive as well as choose the Operating System (SmartOS, Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows Server, Fedora and Debian) the virtual server runs on.