|
Contributors | Messages | Polls | Resources |
|
Accenture's Kahan: What Cloud Brings to Carrier BusinessEnterprise cloud offering requires an ecosystem But the reality of cloud is also we are not alone. We need to accept this is as a whole ecosystem. Very few players have managed to be a single player and ignore what's left and right. The ecosystem is a whole bunch of things. It is your competitor. But it is also your partner, probably. The ecosystem can be or should be your channel. How do we sell to, sell with, and sell through the market? And it is probably also your client. What does it require, in reality, to launch a successful enterprise public cloud offering? It requires cloud competency, and this is one of the areas where many providers are traditionally challenged. I don't mean this in a bad way. It demands a high amount of cloud experts and innovation in the cloud area. And this is traditionally not something where the communications service providers come from. Actually, they come from vertical solutions, not from horizontal solutions. It requires delivery excellence. I gave a quick indication that speed is the king. It requires new approaches on how we go to market. Should we do it on our own? Should we resell it, go via channels? How do we engage with partners? And it also demands that we strategize. What are the services we push out? Is it basic infrastructure services? Is it PaaS? Is it integrated vertical services? Most important is the cloud management system. How do we connect our solutions to our customers so they are able to dynamically integrate it into their systems? As I said in the beginning, we believe that new cloud solutions will be successful also in the future. However, we can't forget there are big web-scale players out there. They are leagues ahead. We believe we can be successful still in regionally segmented markets, where we have some specialties, regulations, and legislation. A local CSP, a local player, can really leverage a competitive advantage. It can be something like we had in Europe, where the safe harbor case in the European court, where the industry will not be legally allowed to push sensitive data into a public cloud. Second, the road to cloud is expensive! You need to have the breadth to invest in it, big money, to make a sustainable investment over multiple years. The focus should be set beyond the pure technical solutions. It's great if I have a great web portal, I can offer infrastructure, and I can configure a virtual machine [VM] with my credit card. That's great. But it is not exactly what my enterprise client is asking for. I mean have you ever seen a single client ordering 7,000 VMs with a single credit card? I haven't. What we offer needs to precisely match the request. I said I want to give a bit broader perspective on what cloud does. And what we must not forget is that the cloud itself plays a very distinguished role in the CSPs' own infrastructure, inside the core networks, and how we actually deliver those services. If you offer some sorts of services -- integrated services, virtual PBX, Internet services, e-mail, and collaboration services -- towards the customer. Traditionally, this has been delivered by the telco department or the IT department, and vice versa. You can be very arbitrary in the way you cut this. But still these basic systems and services are even today partially delivered using a virtualized infrastructure. We also appreciate that there is a very big transformation on the horizon, already started, to renew and refresh the operators' core network architecture. I think we can safely say that the trend is to converge to a three-tier model, from the old legacy. We've seen the first generation of virtualized cloud infrastructure is supporting the core network functions. It may be focused on central functions. Now, we have started to realize that probably there is only a limited set of functions that are inherently able to be centralized. So what we have ahead is massive. It is a challenge: How can we get more virtualization out into the aggregation and towards the edge while also supporting us to more efficiently deliver customer services near to the customers? And that will eventually yield the following: We will see a massive amount of VNFI clouds, probably thousands of them -- micro edge clouds, I call them -- that are augmenting a central telco cloud united by a central VM. This is aligned to the ETSI model, but it also requires very mature integration services on top of that. Consequently, what this drives is a change in the communication service providers' operating model. We will see a shift of your native functions, where all your IP sits, towards operating services and applications while the cloud operations are underneath. If cloud is not yet a commodity, it is already getting commoditized. That is the start for the telco IT convergence. Your IT and traditional telco departments are uniting forces to deliver the base cloud services that eventually your customers receive. So I think it is evident that the boundary between telco and IT in the cloud age is blurring already. And it will continue. We will see a converged cloud operations department in the future. They will have very specialized units, integrating services on top of that and delivering this to the end customers. Whether this is your enterprise segment delivering infrastructure-as-a-service; your small and medium business department delivering the virtual PBX; from your customers' point of view, it is the same. And the operations underneath will be restructured according to this. With this, let me close. Let me thank you again. I think it is evident that the industry is challenged. There are a lot of new opportunities out there. It's up to us to seize them with the right strategy and with the right approach. The time is now. There is no more thrilling place to be in the industry than here. Thank you for your attention.
< Previous Page 2 / 2 |
In part two of this Q&A, the carrier's group head of network virtualization, SDN and NFV calls on vendors to move faster and lead the cloudification charge.
It's time to focus on cloudification instead, Fran Heeran, the group head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV at Vodafone, says.
5G must coexist with LTE, 3G and a host of technologies that will ride on top of it, says Arnaud Vamparys, Orange Network Labs' senior vice president for radio networks.
The OpenStack Foundation's Ildiko Vancsa suggests that 5G readiness means never abandoning telco applications and infrastructures once they're 'cloudy enough.'
IDC's John Delaney talks about how telecom CIOs are addressing the relationship between 5G, automation and virtualization, while cautioning that they might be forgetting the basics.
On-the-Air Thursdays Digital Audio
ARCHIVED | December 7, 2017, 12pm EST
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
Special Huawei Video
Huawei Network Transformation Seminar The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete. |
|
|
||
Telco Transformation
About Us
Contact Us
Help
Register
Twitter
Facebook
RSS
Copyright © 2024 Light Reading, part of Informa Tech, a division of Informa PLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Cookie Policy | Terms of Use in partnership with
|