View from the Top: Gordon Rawling of Oracle


                          
Gordon Rawling: Telcos can use cloud to make themselves
more indispensable service providers to business and
personal customers
                          
                      
Recent research by analyst house Quocirca — after a commission by Oracle — found most businesses across all sectors have assessed the merits of cloud, and adoption rates are increasing steadily.
However, understanding and subsequent adoption appear to be most advanced within telecoms and media businesses, whose particular challenges seem best served by cloud computing.
It certainly makes a lot of sense that companies in communications and media in particular would be looking at the cloud, as the benefits of cloud computing are well suited to industries which need to innovate rapidly and build upon infrastructure which enables greater flexibility. Flexibility in telecoms and media is particularly important currently due to a high volume of consolidation and flux in both industries.
Mergers and acquisitions can prove costly and difficult at the best of times, but businesses in these highly competitive sectors are keener than ever to see a fast return on investment. Merging systems and customer data, not to mention provisioning hundreds or even thousands of new users, can be done quickly and efficiently through the smart use of applications, operating systems and data served centrally via cloud and cloud-like models.
Furthermore, the scale of these businesses and the resultant amounts of customer data they process has created a challenge of its own which is being effectively dealt with by migration to both private and public cloud infrastructure.
But there is a further, and perhaps more pressing, reason why the telecoms industry in particular is embracing cloud infrastructure, beyond those benefits such as lower total cost of ownership which are universal to any vertical industry.
Service providers are increasingly seeing cloud computing as a way of extending their range of services to customers; and mitigating the risk of being marginalised as a dumb pipe over which third parties provide applications and services. They are now looking to build out cloud operations for customers in an attempt to grow revenue per user and make themselves more indispensable service providers to business and personal customers alike.
This is a real open window of opportunity. Cloud infrastructure has not just presented them with the chance to improve their own internal processes but to offer services to customers above and beyond the provision of bandwidth and connectivity which have become commoditised in recent years.
By building out their own cloud offerings, providers are able to offer services from hosted apps to customer self-service portals, remote storage and back-up, and infrastructure as a service for resellers. However, in order to make money they need to ensure they are not simply swapping one commodity battle for another.
They won’t be able to compete directly with companies offering a commoditised public cloud; instead they must differentiate through the quality of the services they offer in the cloud. That means they need careful control of the management of these customer clouds.
According to Quocirca’s research, most businesses have overcome concerns about security in the cloud. In fact, 28% said they see it as no issue at all. Security has been an unnecessary thorn in the side of cloud computing for many years that owes more to perception than reality. The perception must be managed and telcos are in a strong position to build in enhanced security across the network.
In order to capitalise on the window of opportunity, telcos must embrace cloud computing on two fronts: they must take advantage of it as a way to improve the efficiency of their own internal processes at a time of great flux; and they must take advantage of their customers’ requirement for flexible, easy to manage IT, by providing public-facing cloud infrastructure with value-added managed services.
Unbreakable allegiances have not yet been formed. The Quocirca research reveals the move is really only just underway. Telcos can therefore present themselves as a one-stop shop for all IT needs, from bandwidth to business intelligence while exploiting the long-standing trusted relationships they have with customers looking for a partner to take them into the cloud, or help them remove complexity and cost from their IT management.
Operators must make this leap from dumb pipe to service provider or risk being marginalised as commodity players trading in nothing more than bandwidth. Cloud holds the key to achieving this.
Given the investments being made already by many CSPs in transitioning their business model to more of a full-service cloud provider model, those who don’t move with the times will simply be forced off the edges of the map by the CSPs who are still providing bandwidth and traditional services, but are also taking their customers into the cloud. GTB
                      
Gordon Rawling is senior marketing director for communications at Oracle

Further reading from Global Telecoms Business:
What does SaaS really mean? View from the Top from Bill ... 08 Dec 2011
Speed and efficiency at the forefront as cloud services move ... 26 Sep 2011
HTC acquires US cloud services firm 08 Aug 2011
Cloud strategy for communications service providers 01 Aug 2011
Cloud services push demand for bandwidth and LTE 01 Aug 2011