Telcos on Cloud

Telecom companies have evidently come to a complete realization of the future of cloud and the advantages it brings with it. They are aware that cloud market is small yet has a long, but a definite future for pure-play cloud services. With right investments—partners, people and processes, telcos could scale the operations to take the leadership position in this space. The industry consensus is that every thing which is new has a fair share of issues around security, performance and uptime. It is important for customers to perceive the far-reaching benefits to business and weigh them against the perceived threats. And the adoption of cloud is more about fighting the internal resistance to change.

Let us take a quick look into a few telcos' perception and strategies on cloud technology while they leverage on cloud despite ifs and buts.
Operators predominantly offer 'utility' communications services. Cloud services are application and data center infrastructure utility services that are delivered via the communications services. Service providers are looking for adjacent offers that their customers need, with commoditization of voice and data services. Cloud Services offer telecom service providers an opportunity to leverage their assets and offer value added services and bundled solutions to enterprises in infrastructure, computing, hosting and network services.

Cloud Approach/Offerings
As a data center services provider, it is now a basic expectation from customers that we provide Storage-as-a-Service & Back-up as a service. Infrastructure as a service has extended a huge opportunity, it has wide acceptance and demand from full spectrum of enterprises, whether large, medium or small. Our software-as-a-service is evolving and it is primarily targeted at medium and small enterprises-we are currently offering Hosted Mail solutions from Zimbra and expanding our services to offer more software from Microsoft platform such as Exchange and Hosted MS Office.

Cloud Strategy
Cloud services are expected to have hyper-competitive market scenarios. There are pricing positions taken by various operators in India, even before the market has matured. We would like to first ensure that our customers have the infrastructure that they can trust their business on. We are doing so by working closely with industry leading platforms-IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco etc. Once we have the customer's trust, pricing is a function of scale. We would compete on the quality of our infrastructure, build-scale on customer's trust, prior to competing on price.

Cloud Approach/Offerings
Reliance's approach to Cloud Computing is to enable it for our customer base, to break down the barriers to adoption and to bring to market the monitoring, management and assurance that the customer has come to expect for the traditional business services we offer to them. As a provider of managed ICT services, Reliance recognizes that Cloud Computing requires the skilled staff, systems and processes to deliver a 24x7 high quality user experience. Our end-to-end system view enables us to focus not just on the technologies but also ensure our service meets customer expectations.

Cloud Strategy
Reliance's strategy is to create a marketplace of services across the Cloud Computing spectrum. A number of these will be Reliance's own services, others will be through partners. Regardless of whether or not Reliance owns the service, we will take full ownership of the customer experience for the Cloud service. Through managing the end-to-end Cloud Computing service, Reliance will address the challenges of security, performance and availability. We are enhancing our existing network management tools with next generation Cloud focused management systems that will allow us to monitor and manage the performance of the Cloud domain and correlate its performance with the underlying networks. Reliance will take complete ownership of the end-to-end performance, identifying and remedying incidents, highlighting performance trends and tuning of the service to meet performance SLAs.
In addition to day-to-day performance management for the Cloud services, Reliance will simplify procurement for its customers by providing a one-stop-shop for a wide catalog of Cloud services, offering the customer a single point of contact, a single contract, and a single invoice.

Cloud Approach/Offerings
We are taking a multi-pronged approach towards cloud computing. We offer: Cloud infrastructure as a service for early adopter (Iaas), solutions on cloud for sophisticated and large buyers, and leverage the ecosystem technology and partnerships for meeting customer needs and improving the time to market.
Tata Communications is more nimble and capable through our early use of SaaS applications like Zuora for billing, SuccessFactors for HRIS, and Salesforce.com for sales force automation.

Cloud Strategy
For IaaS:

  Basic Compute as a Service
  Easy Adoption, Low Cost Point
  Global Portability
  Enterprise Governance Model
  Private Access in addition to Internet

For SaaS:
 A suite of application services for India SME and for Indian enterprises
 Collaboration, HRIS, security, hosted contact center, etc

Cloud Approach/Offerings
Comviva is a highly diversified VAS company with a cloud strategy that extends across its product portfolio. Comviva has worked in close association with mobile operators adopting a consultative approach to help clients evaluate the fit of cloud computing to their VAS environment and overall business goals. We have already integrated our platforms with existing cloud infrastructure providers to enable operators to launch a range of services without requiring upfront capex investment

Cloud Strategy
Comviva has been working with many operators in the past to provide solutions without necessarily deploying hardware at each operator's location. This has lead to Comviva having an early lead in providing cloud based services to operators for many of its product lines, essentially making them available over a SaaS model. Comviva's messaging and data solutions have been served to medium and small operators (Africa, Middle East, and Latin America) from a cloud based platform for more than past 5 years.

Some of the products/services and solutions in our bouquet are:
  VAS Infrastructure as a Service: This is an expensive proposition on account of the wide variations between average and peak capacity utilization levels. On festive occasions or seasonal events, traffic volumes exceed average flows by a factor of five. To address this fluctuating demand, Comviva extends VAS Infrastructure as a service to customers, which operates from one physical cluster in the cloud.
  Mobile Widget Platform: Comviva's WebAxn platforms enable operators to open up web development and rapidly introduce a range of services in line with evolving consumer demand patterns.
  Mobile Gaming as a Service: Comviva's Online Gaming Solution deploys the principles of cloud computing to extend 'gaming as a service' to mobile users. It provides an end-to-end Online Gaming Solution uniting technology, content alliances and services management.

Cloud Approach/Offerings
AT&T is building cloud elements in cloud services into our network so that customers would be leveraging in these global networks. And they could also opt to purchase integrated cloud services. We do have aspirations to participate in Saas space although we do not have major offerings in this space. We have been providing private cloud solutions from many years in our hosting business on our dedicated architecture base. We provide integrated solutions.

Cloud Strategy
A key element of our cloud strategy is active engagement with solution developers and other cloud vendors to help us deliver solutions marked by innovation, openness, and interoperability. We have embedded cloud capabilities directly into the AT&T managed network so that we can manage and deliver cloud services and applications as part of a total solution straight down to any device. In parallel, we are rolling out an enterprise-grade portfolio of cloud solutions that offer customers tremendous flexibility and shared economics for their compute and storage needs protected by our industry-leading network-based security solutions.