me information is of course confidential and may only be accessed by the enterprise employees. Application services providers (ASP) and Internet service providers (ISP) The general trend today is that enterprises want to focus strictly on the core business, that is, what is expressed as a business idea in the business plan. The reason is that they want Understanding Changing Telecommunications - Building a Successful Telecom Business to increase effectiveness and competitiveness. Non-core activities and assets, for example housing and management of housing, communication networks, cleaning and commodity manufacturing with no strategic content is outsourced to other companies. In doing this the enterprises gain two things. One is that they don't need to waste management attention and other company resources on non-core business activities. The second gain is that other companies that are specialized in the respective areas probably will do it much cheaper and better due to large-scale operations and specialized experts. This is a reason for outsourcing, in this case outsourcing communication and Inter- net services. Services and content for specific applications are sourced from specialized providers. Many enterprises want to keep in-house control over sensitive or mission- critical communication resources. Still, the largest part of communication resources and services can be outsourced, especially as security functions such as firewalls, encryption and anti-virus programs are continuously evolving. See further discussions in Section 2.3.4 below. The Internet The Internet represents a globally anywhere and anytime information and communication resource. A main use is for information retrieval in databases and Internet portals all over the world. Initially only text was transported, later still pictures, and now multimedia combining text, sound and still or moving pictures are used. Another main use is for e-mail. In the evolving IP-telephony or voice over IP (VoIP) service, voice or rather sound information in te