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Pipeline:
What are some mission-critical services that are finding their way onto the cloud that might not have a few years ago?
Caniano:
Well, there’s a natural evolution in the maturing of any business model. At first, you have fairly straight-forward use-cases, with relatively little risk. As these business models mature, however, and services mature, you start to adopt more serious use-cases. We saw this with the cloud. At first, you saw development and testing taking place in the cloud, and now, over time, we’re moving to critical data in the cloud. Things like the archiving of sensitive data taking place in a cloud environment.
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"There is a definite shift taking place towards more on-demand services." |
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Caniano:
Just as in any case, our vision for cloud is tied to our customers, who understand their own business needs. While we like to feel like we have very good vision in terms of where business is going, our vision is ultimately driven by the needs of our customers. Those customers who need to be very dynamic are moving in a direction to mobilize most of their business processes and applications. They’re demonstrating a need for certain real-time capabilities that reflect the business requirements today.
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However, one thing to keep in mind about AT&T’s approach to the cloud, and about the cloud in general, is that it is consumption-oriented. The cloud is a complimentary architecture for other architectures that exist. There are cases in which the cloud makes sense, and other cases in which it may not.
Pipeline:
One element of your inclusion in the Gartner “magic quadrant” report was the "completeness of vision" that you show with regards to cloud concepts, with an especially high weight given to market understanding, offering strategy, and innovation. How has AT&T gone about developing this complete vision?
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The only thing I’d emphasize is that I do think this is an evolving market, and a paradigm shift that will continue to take shape. Enterprise customers need to make sure they understand their requirements of the technology, and the corresponding capabilities of the CSP they’re dealing with. Cloud is no different. For our part, we see cloud as part and parcel of the network. That’s the approach we take.
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