Expect to hear more from T-Systems, as well as Orange, in the months ahead, as Europe turns up the heat on the cloud market. Having lagged behind American companies on technological fronts like internet search engines, consumer electronics and social media, the Old World, it would appear, has no intention of letting the cloud slip so vaporously through its fingers. In mid-January, Henning Kagermann—the erstwhile CEO of SAP, now president of Germany's National Academy of Science and Engineering—was quoted by Bloomberg as saying, "I can't imagine that Europe can afford to leave this field to the U.S. This year will show whether we're serious about this."
The issue of data privacy affords European companies like Orange and T-Systems the ammunition they need to wage cloud warfare against the U.S. "Certainly," added Babel, "it's being used as a marketing tool."
Babel does point out that U.S. cloud carriers can outsource local hosting in order to overcome concerns of privacy as a viable strategy for what is shaping up to be an all-out Cloud War, a war in which sentiment like Kagermann's may just be the shot heard 'round the world.'
Japan a Second Front in Cloud War
Half a world away, to the east, Japanese IT behemoth NEC has likewise been busy making friends in the lofty cloud space. In early December, that company teamed up with Russian CSP Mobile TeleSystems OJSC on MTS' first SaaS service in the Republic of Belarus, and only days later revealed it was bringing the power of cloud to Argentine SMEs under the purview of Telefónica.
Recall, that first deal availed Belarusian MTS subscribers of pay-as-you-go business apps, including accounting service "1C-Enterprise," web and mobile ad creation software Publiclick, web-conferencing service VideoBridge and vid-conferencing app Spontania. Telefónica's Aplicateca service, powered by NEC's cloud platform, presents—at least, initially—Argentine small- and medium-sized business customers with a range of SaaS applications and services on a pay-per-license basis.
As an NEC spokesperson told Pipeline:
"The Carrier Cloud NEC is promoting is very unique. NEC will work together with carriers in the construction of platforms and provision of services, as well as to share revenue. In addition to SaaS, IaaS, and DaaS, NEC would like to promote such concepts as WaaS (Workplace as a Service) and CaaS (Community as a Service). NEC is totally committed to expanding the foot print of Telefónica's model and has already received new projects from Telefónica Spain, O2 Ireland and Telefónica Argentina within the Telefónica group, but also from Thailand TOT and Belarus MTS as well. At the same time, NEC is keen to expand its offering to IaaS and DaaS as a first step toward deployment on a worldwide basis."
Speaking of the Cloud…
Microsoft made available the latest iteration of its systems management software, Microsoft System Center 2012, in the form of a release candidate. To usher in the new platform—this one optimized for cloud— the software titan hosted a webcast in mid-January, complete with a panel of representatives from happy customers of System Center, high-profile figures as Lufthansa, T. Rowe Price and Unilever.
Johan Norvik, Microsoft's managing director of Worldwide Telecommunications, told Pipeline, "With the release of System Center 2012, we're bringing private and public cloud together. New advances in System Center 2012 demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to easing the acquisition, deployment and economics of private cloud computing. Many of our customers are betting on the Microsoft private cloud today and we view System Center 2012 as a true private cloud builder."
