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Send in the Clouds
There is enough going on with Cloud Computing that we, as the telecom industry, need to think through the implications and develop a strategic response. Cloud Computing will become more than outsourcing management of "context practice" applications, it will be the outsourcing of that which needs to be managed. Service Providers (and by implication the rest of us as consultants and vendors in telecom) need to investigate the cloud from two perspectives, as a user of and as a provider of Cloud Computing.
As a user we need to assess the:
- Use of the cloud to provide management platforms/applications for our networks;
- Migration of telecom services into the cloud.
As a provider of Cloud Computing services to other businesses, we need to determine:
- How this will shape the structure of our changing market/ecosystem; and
- Are we ready to invest in service ecosystem approaches in order to create market differentiating products?
Even to seek answers to these strategic questions we need rare skills. Today a key blocker to formulating strategy and also to cloud uptake is the need for broadly skilled people: people with experience developing on the web, plus knowledge of highly distributed programming, plus SOA. For Microsoft, the challenges in providing large-scale SaaS services for business "requires significant expertise in high availability, security, multi-tenant architectures, network topologies and problem resolution," Cain writes in the Gartner report on Cloud Computing. In our articles we have noted again and again that, today, computer platforms, applications, and network architecture go hand-in-hand. Each involves tradeoffs and synergies with the other. This requires a rare individual who is experienced in the creation of architecture for all three and who additionally embodies the skills of the business analyst. We call this person a polyarchitect. The polyarchitect leads a collaborative team of business analysts and service matter experts in the various technologies.
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There is enough going on with Cloud Computing that we, as the telecom industry, need to think through the implications and develop a strategic response.
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Reuven Cohn at elasticvapor.com says: "As for what is Cloud Computing, I boil it down to simply 'Internet centric software' or any software that has a network centric component to it. Which in the near future will probably be all software." Here at LTC, we also see the world becoming one big ball of network-resident software; we call this future software/network: TeleGaia.
Fundamentally, how much do networks actually differentiate as competitors in telecom today? As service providers, we originally competed on quality; then we competed on access; now we compete on cost. This is the downward spiral of an industry nearing what physicists call heat death, telco CEOs call marginalization, and investors call commoditization. It is the evolution from growth company to dividend paying utility. It opens telecom up to dangers, possibly extinction, at the hands of edge applications and big datacenters controlling the path of cloud computing. If so, rough seas are ahead for telecom. "Even so my sun one early morn did shine; With all triumphant splendor on my brow; But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now." (Shakespeare.)
Cloud Computing, with the opportunities and threats flowing from it, is just another facet of the edge vs. core argument we explored in Edge/Core Collaboration: Navigating the Ocean (Pipeline Feb 2008). We need to not just chart the course on this ocean, but to develop the early monopoly on the navigators. Strategically, this requires adding the early Cloud providers into the membership of the Collaborative Garden. Fundamentally, we can choose whether telecom becomes just a pipe between the edge and the user, or whether telecom collaborates to spread the edge into a cloud, resident in the telecom domain.
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