Over the past years, Telecom carriers and service providers have suffered economic pressures, competition, churn and declining revenue. As they grapple to find ways to improve their ARPU from their core services, many in the Telco industry are attempting to diversify into broader business and consumer value-added services, moving beyond the increasingly commoditized telephone and Internet access. Many of them are planning to or are already expanding aggressively into the “Cloud” space.
The major global carriers already possess the primary infrastructure components for cloud-based service delivery, including expensive IP/MPLS networks, data center facilities, hosting infrastructure businesses with both dedicated and virtualized service offerings, and back-end OSS and BSS needed for orchestration (provisioning, metering, management, reporting and billing). In addition, most Telcos have established bases of enterprises, SMBs (small-and-medium businesses), and residential customers that are potential target markets. AT&T has already made the first step with its Synaptic Hosting service, a multi-tenant utility computing and services suite. BT followed with a VDC (Virtual Data Center) offering, and Verizon has announced recently their Computing as a Service platform. IDC predicts there will be a transformation of carrier networks from a collection of pipes and ports into intelligent platforms, with network-embedded computing, storage, monitoring and service creation / distribution functionality performance-optimized delivery of distributed applications.
Scott Morrison, a research vice president in Gartner’s enterprise network services division, described VDC as a “hybrid” that allows BT to take advantage of its existing physical network and datacentre infrastructure. However, he noted that it also allows the company to begin making the transition to a future service where BT does not necessarily need to own all the underlying assets. “Today, BT has a surprisingly large number of datacentres, particularly in Europe and the UK,” said Morrison. “To be closer to customers and deal with customer needs in the future, [BT's] existing footprint may not serve all [those] needs.”
“Today, if you buy a hosted service from BT, you’re buying a BT MPLS network, connected into a BT datacentre, with servers which BT will supply and manage on your behalf,” Morrison said. “In the future, BT’s real interest is in the service layer on the top. So it has to create an architecture that allows it to deliver that service layer effectively, without necessarily owning all of the bits that sit underneath—and not have an architecture that is based on a BT-specific design set to make it all work.”
Much like other cloud computing offerings, AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service aims to give users scalable on-demand computing capacity, which comes as a global cloud-based service. AT&T has now brought to the table the global reach of its existing MPLS network as well as a reputation for security that it argues newer cloud computing providers don’t have. Its new computing offering joins the hosting and storage services in its 18-month-old Synaptic-brand service portfolio. Some features of AT&T’s new CaaS offering include:
- A Web portal to order, provision and manage server capacity, or to program the APIs.
- A monthly bill — only for the capacity used — that can be paid with a credit card.
- Multiple storage options including disk capacity for each virtual server’s operating system and space to share files between virtual servers, as well as the ability to connect to AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service.
- Round-the-clock monitoring by AT&T support teams.
- A service level agreement that covers availability of the platform that runs the customer’s virtual servers.
The question that ponders me now is with all these CaaS offerings out in the market, will there be an over-supply of compute resources? Or will this glut of compute resources spurs creative minds out there to innovate and generate the next technology break through? We will know soon…
Tags: Business, Cloud Computing, Consumers, Emerging trends, services, strategy, Virtualization