Letter from the Editor

By: Tim Young

-Rabindranath Tagore, "Stray Birds" (1916)

One of the interesting things in watching the growth and maturation of the cloud is how scared of it so many were at first. Was there a viable market for cloud solutions? Would it be secure enough? Would reliability be an issue? Where will communications service providers (CSPs) fit in to the value proposition?

At this point, some of those questions may still remain in the minds of some; but the market for cloud services­— platform-, software- or infrastructure-as-a-service—, is robust and the cloud is changing shape, as clouds are wont to do. It is becoming less of a harbinger of doom (or at least complication) and more of a sign of tremendous potential.

Service providers have an interesting relationship with the cloud particularly because they both affect and are affected by the cloud. Cloud computing is dependent upon the connectivity provided by CSPs, and it also provides an opportunity for those same CSPs to engage its customers in new and different ways. CSPs have the potential to offer cloud services of unrivaled quality because they have a level of network visibility that external providers cannot match. As Orange’s Jamil Chawki, who specializes in cloud standardization, pointed out in a recent blog post, CSPs also already possess the OSS/BSS and customer support infrastructures that few external players can match, as well as enviable status as a trusted partner and service broker that makes the cloud a natural new frontier for CSPs.

And what a promising frontier it is. IDC estimates that the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market, for example, will balloon from $3.8 billion in 2012 to $14 billion in 2017. Ashesh Badani, general manager of Red Hat’s cloud business unit, was recently quoted as saying that the total addressable market for PaaS could be as large as $20 billion. The cloud is also being seen as a potential problem-solver for business problems from disaster recovery to graphics support to complex billing.

More than ever, the cloud is looking like a thing of beauty. 

In this issue of Pipeline, we explore the latest challenges and promises of the cloud. We’ll examine various angles of the cloud market and the role of CSPs in it. We’ll look at new attempts at standardization as virtualization becomes more widespread. We’ll also check out how the cloud is impacting unified communications (UC), changing the billing landscape and creating new hurdles and opportunities for data centers. We’ll talk with Sprint on successful cloud strategies, examine the state of customer care and discuss the next generation of automation. We bring you all that, plus more of the latest news and opinion from across the communications technology industry.

Thanks for floating by Pipeline, and enjoy the issue. 

Best,

Tim Young
Editor-in-Chief