Traditional carriers are investing and aggressively shouldering their way into the cloud computing space. Although they expect large revenues from the promising cloud services market, telcos however have the disadvantage of not being IT integrators. Companies are looking for providers that have complex IT skills and can integrate multiple systems. This is a major issue for carriers. But they can claim that they are the best placed to solve the two main drawbacks of cloud architectures: on one side, they tend to reduce administrators’ visibility ; on the other side, the reliability of service cannot easily be guaranteed, especially for customers whose operations demand near-perpetual uptime.
In other words, SaaS and IaaS are one thing and networking is another. This is an argument carriers can definitely put on the table facing private cloud offerings like Google/Amazon and others
Cloud is about people, services and solutions
Indeed, Cloud is not only about platforms, it is about people, services and solutions. While SaaS services will run on a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), other solutions like digital signage, Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and Connected Home need much more than PaaS, they need servers, devices and a new business model. On the telecoms infrastructure side, there are many industry standards and blueprints on which to build a network, but IT oriented services are driven more by the carrier and their customers.
Achieving Carrier Cloud supposes to visualize and automate cloud service operations. It is also important to virtualize the network and to control the network’ s paths and flows dynamically.
During the Carrier Cloud Summit, to be held in Novotel Wellness & Convention Centre Paris Roissy CDG from 19 to 21 June, 2012, project leaders, manufacturers and service developers will address these aspects in detail through up-to-date contributions.
