Mobile operators should look to provide cloud services, according to IHS

The opportunities for wireless services providers to offer cloud services are vast, according to new research.

While traditional IT vendors, such as Google, Dell, Amazon and Microsoft dominate the cloud computing market, mobile operators have competitive advantages over these players, according to Market intelligence provider IHS iSuppli.

This is because they possess important information about customer preferences so they can present more personalised packages, adding value to the overall service. In addition, mobile operators also have billing platforms for charging customers based on usage, which enhances customers’ ease of use.

The firm revealed its forecast that consumer and enterprise spending on cloud services is set to expand nearly fivefold during the next five years, to reach more than $100 billion in 2015.

IHS iSuppli advised mobile operators to offer web-based applications and virtual storage services, together with enhanced data security and contingency backup plans, in order to make the most of the opportunities on offer.

“Cloud participants can achieve higher margins if they employ a service model that offers an entire ecosystem including software, a platform of services and infrastructure—as opposed to just providing the discrete parts making up the whole,” the company said. “The other option would be to combine elements from separate service models, or to offer standalone service models.”

Telstra will invest AU$800m in cloud computing over the next five years

Telstra has announced a £500m+ (AU$800m) investment in cloud computing over the next five years to support what it says is a growing demand from Australian organisations for cloud services.

The telco is rumoured to have invested AU$200m in the cloud to date and this latest announcement will kick-off the construction of a new data centre, the modernisation of existing facilities, increased automation of utility computing services and the expansion of the telco’s range of enterprise applications, among other things. Construction of a new data centre in Melbourne is already underway.

CEO David Thodey said that sales of the company’s T-Suite software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering had grown threefold in the past year, while use of Telstra’s cloud infrastructure had increased by 50 per cent. Making the announcement, Thodey said that the company was “also experiencing strong sales in our cloud voice and video services, which are exceeding 80 per cent per year and we now manage more than 100,000 IP telephony services delivered from the cloud.”

Telstra is partnering with vendors Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and Accenture to build the next phase of its integrated cloud platform and services. According to the company, cloud is part of Telstra’s strategy to grow its network application and services business. The telco says that, over the past year, it has spoken to more than 160 Australian organisations about their cloud computing needs, “with many of these beginning to move into the cloud.” Among those using Telstra’s cloud services are Tristar Medical Group, Oz Minerals and The Salvation Army Employment Plus.

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The European Commission has called for input on the development of cloud computing in the EU

The EU Commission has launched a public consultation process into how businesses, public administrations and other interested parties can benefit from a cloud computing market that the Commission predicts will be worth €35bn in Europe by 2014.

According to the Commission, cloud can “help businesses – especially SMEs – to drastically reduce information technology costs, help governments supply services at a lower cost and save energy by making more efficient use of hardware.”

Promoting the right conditions for users to best benefit from cloud computing has been identified as a key action by the EC’s Digital Agenda for Europe body. EC VP for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, said that the EU needed a “well-defined cloud computing strategy to ensure that we make the best use of this potential,” and called on all interested parties to offer input into how this might best be achieved. Speaking on the subject in January this year, Kroes said that she wanted to make Europe not just “cloud friendly, but cloud-active.”

Among the issues the Commission is seeking feedback on are data protection and liability questions, particularly in cross-border sitations, legal and technical barriers that could slow down the development of cloud computing in Europe and standardisation and interoperability solutions.

The consultation process will end on August 31^st this year and the results will be fed into a European cloud strategy to be published in 2012.

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Multinationals increasing need for on-demand computing has enhanced telcos' status as cloud providers

As uptake of cloud computing services  by multinational corporations takes off, Ovum research indicates that the credibility of telcos as trusted providers in the space has increased significantly in the past year.

With ratings increasing from 37 per cent in 2010 to 49 per cent this year, telcos are now in third position behind traditional IT service providers/ integrators (61 per cent) and web-based service providers (58 per cent) when it comes to corporate trust for cloud implementations.

Evan Kirchheimer, practice leader for Enterprise Services at Ovum, said that telco providers’ control over the networks on which cloud services are offered gives them a “compelling advantage” over other cloud providers, as it allows them to offer end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs). “This allays many of the security concerns enterprises have expressed over use of the public internet to access cloud services and general security, data governance and loss of control,” he said.

According to Matt Key, managing director of enterprise for Cable and Wireless, trust in telcos is building because “the role of the network has changed fundamentally over the last three-to-five years; they have gone from being incidental to critical to the business.”

“Cloud technology is based on propositions telcos already offer: assets, network, scale, flexibility, agility,” says Key, adding that these  are well placed to leverage their experience in areas such as managed hosting and data services to offer other services in the cloud, including compute capacity.

Kirchheimer says that while people tend to think about cloud only from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) perspective, increasing interest in storage and computing power is contributing to a more prominent role for telcos. Citing examples such as computing-on-demand, the flexibility to add or remove services as needed and reduced capex costs, Kirchheimer says that telcos offer end-users the kind of governance and service level frameworks that businesses may be unable to guarantee for themselves internally. With Key stating that the role of the CIO has evolved to become one of business-centric enabler, it’s increasingly the case that high-cost IT functions are looking to streamline by moving capacity into the cloud where it can be switched on or off as needed.

“This is very much a demand-side development,” says Kirchheimer. “A lot of telcos are offering near real-time network provisioning services with computing-as-a-service because that’s what their clients are asking them about.” With multinationals increasingly looking to have on-demand compute capacity, Kirchheimer believes that  we’re going to see a lot of Tier 1 telcos and data centre specialists linking up with Tier 2 providers to form “cloud partnerships” offering services to businesses with global requirements

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