Telcos must seize the opportunity of cloud services
As telcos move forward into the 4G era, and basic voice and data transmission services become increasingly commoditised, the need to find a viable model for delivering value-added services becomes more urgent for both mobile and fixed-line operators. Cloud services are being suggested as the panacea. But how do cloud services differ from the managed services or hosted services of the dot-com period, and how can telcos avoid the mistakes that have dogged them for the last ten years? Symantec’s overtures to the sector may show the way forward.
4G networks can provide a rich application ecosystem
4G networks hold the prospect of a rich media ecosystem populated by a multitude of services from different suppliers. Telcos could derive revenues by selling third-party services from outside their network. Their customers’ expectations will be more aligned with those of Internet users today. But telcos need to radically change their attitudes to seize the opportunity, and the industry needs to do more work to standardise inter-network service interfaces in a way that preserves service quality and monetary value.
Get the network architecture right before adding services
A service-oriented network architecture needs to provide an abstraction layer separating the physical network from the applications and services it hosts. It also needs to be inherently secure.
Telcos have been slow to appreciate the scale of the problem of spam and its impact on their services. Symantec is extending the concept of clean pipes, from being a way that enterprises can connect with a managed security service provider to being a means of interconnecting service providers. This should prevent spam and malware travelling between service provider networks, and reduce bandwidth requirements while improving quality of service. This frees resources for new high-quality services.
Telcos must follow a business-driven approach
Telcos still make most of their money from voice traffic, despite a decade of commoditisation. Unlike the 2G and 3G service rollouts, they must come up with a flexible implementation that is geared to a revenue-generating business case, and not repeat the mistakes of the past. Individually, today’s cloud services are similar to the managed or hosted services of the dot-com era, which failed to deliver commercial success. If we are to advance, the services must be flexible and interoperable. It is essential that new services are designed to meet the needs of the market and exploit the capabilities of IP-hosted technologies such as web service protocols and virtualisation.
Early enterprise market opportunities appear to lie largely in the infrastructure-as-a-service area, such as storage, back-up and disaster recovery services.
Customers need to have the ability to configure services. Corporate customers need to be able to apply policies to their end users, while parents might want to apply some parental control policies to their children’s devices. For example, Irish vendor Adaptive Mobile sells a layer of software to enable this deployment.
For their part, software vendors need to work closely with network equipment providers to provide a unified offering to the telcos.
Symantec’s size gives it strength in this market
Symantec has the breadth of coverage to address several of the needs of telcos. It can provide the technology to build ‘clean pipes’, as well as playing in the next stage of providing value-added services for the service providers to resell. Telcos want their data centres to be a base for revenue-generating services and not to be solely an operational cost. Symantec is able to offer products on which they can build their own security and storage services. It can also offer the same technology from its own data centres as a service that the telco can re-badge. If the telco hosts the services, it is possible to use cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon’s EC2 as a failover or overflow platform at busy times.
Symantec’s strategy shows the rationale underlying its acquisition of MessageLabs in 2008, with its global network of data centres and its experience in operating cloud services.
Symantec’s most successful cloud service so far is a managed storage service using Backup Exec that already provides 45 petabytes of storage. The main market is the SME sector. Symantec claims that its large scale of operation cuts storage costs by 90% compared with an SME providing its own storage.
With many thans to Ovum
