Thinking Beyond the Cloud

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Verizon and CenturyLink, have taken a different approach and acquired cloud computing companies in order to quickly get to the front of the pack.

Current Offerings

"The most common CSP cloud services are perhaps multi-tenanted communications services (a category of SaaS), such as hosted unified communications and hosted contact center, and a number of CSPs also offer cloud computing," says John Landau. IaaS offerings are available from many Tier 1 carriers, including AT&T, Orange, BT, Tata Communications, Verizon (via Terremark), and CenturyLink (via Savvis). As noted above, PaaS offerings from CSPs are still in their nascent stage, but there are some examples.

I spoke with Steve Caniano, VP of hosting, application and cloud services at AT&T, about AT&T Platform as a Service, which was launched in November 2011. He noted, "It's an online, cloud-based service that allows for fast development of cloud-based business apps. It's an offer targeted primarily to independent software vendors, corporate information technology leaders, and line-of-business managers."

A Changing Skyscape

As a result of CSPs movement into the cloud computing market, several trends have emerged. First, we're seeing CSPs expand and evolve into more of an IT services company. This both creates opportunities for new offerings like a business triple-play bundle (communications services, customer relationship management, and IT services on one bill from one provider), as well as challenges for CSPs, as they "start competing with the internal IT operations of their business customers," pointed out VirtualCom's Sanjay Kumar.

Another trend is found in the competitive landscape itself. No longer is it a question of Verizon competing with AT&T, or KDDI vs. NTT Docomo. Today's competitive landscape is "global service providers from very different regions competing with each other and with global IT services firms," says Kumar.

The opportunities to find gold in the carrier cloud are very real, and CSPs are certainly moving in the right direction. IaaS and SaaS offerings from CSPs are becoming more mature, and improving self-servicing as well as creating PaaS and infrastructure virtualization offerings is a wise move. The coming years will see great growth in the cloud and, combined with the trends highlighted here, the telecom world is changing yet again.