By Tim Young

What’s in a name?

This issue of Pipeline is dedicated to the “cloud”, a term with which I’m not wholly enamored. Like its puffy white namesake, the cloud of the computing realm is nebulous, lacks definite substance, and tends to expand or contract according to the prevailing winds of buzz and jargon.

But that’s just a name. Call it what you will. The “as-a-service” model fits pretty well. SaaS. IaaS. Or, if you want to get really inclusive, you can call upon the reliable variable and deem it XaaS. Or you can drop the innuendo and call it the hosted services model.

But, again, what’s in a name?

The cloud represents a real opportunity for service providers looking to help enterprise customers (especially) take advantage of the model to become more productive and better meet the needs of their end users. Within this issue of Pipeline, and elsewhere within the industry, a great deal of virtual ink has been spilled on how CSPs can increase their revenue and their general relevance by enabling cloud services for enterprise customers. In addition, the extent to which OSS/BSS providers can aid in this increase in cloud focus has been widely commented on.

There’s a great deal of substance here, and leading OSS/BSS providers are doing some very interesting things in the realm of cloud enablement.

The Right Fit

For OSS/BSS providers, the cloud represents a delivery model for support systems that is truly attractive for small and medium service providers. This, naturally, isn’t the side of the cloud that gets the lion’s share of the attention, but the fact is that communications service providers aren’t just enablers of the cloud, but are increasingly consumers of the cloud.

The clear first targets for cloud-based OSS/BSS are the small and rural CSPs. Take the United States, for example. Name a few service providers. AT&T? Verizon? Qwest? They’re probably the first companies I’d name, too.