By: Becky Bracken
What do you do when your customer wants cloud applications and services you don't have yet? It's a real dilemma facing communications service providers (CSPs). The cloud isn't part of their
original business - it's an entirely new animal to tame.It's a mobilized world, and customers want to be able to access their data and services anywhere, everywhere, and in real time. Similarly,
applications including data analytics and other network intelligence tools require a virtualized, dynamic environment in order to realize the operational cost savings and reduced customer churn
they promise…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Cheaper. Scalable. On demand. Try before you buy. Everyone working in IT and telecommunications understands the basics of what “the cloud” is and what kinds of benefits it can offer. Gallons of
ink have been spilled attempting to define it and the myriad of anything-as-a-service (XaaS) applications. While definitions are useful in framing discussion, the cloud remains a bit, well, cloudy,
and for the purposes of monetization, that’s just fine. As Brian Kracik, communications industry director at Oracle, told Pipeline, “The definition of cloud is not binary, but rather a
continuum…
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By: Becky Bracken
According to Forrester Research’s global information and communications technology (ICT) spending forecast, the government sector is the third largest vertical industry at $286 billion, behind
professional services at $505 billion and financial services (banking and securities) at $291 billion. The public sector across the globe is a large, albeit daunting opportunity for those companies
willing to charge into the fray. “Yes, the trend [for governments] is a move toward cloud, primarily in the SaaS market,” says Jennifer Belissent, Ph…
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By: Scott St. John - Pipeline
Virtually every major communications service provider (CSP) around the world is clamoring for its piece of the cloud pie, and for good reason: key industry analysts are estimating the cloud
market to grow at an extraordinary, almost alarming rate. Gartner has predicted it to reach $160 billion by the end of this year, and Forrester has proclaimed that it will expand to $240 billion by
2020. Meanwhile, IDC has predicted that the worldwide cloud-services market will surpass $100 billion by 2016. If none of that sounds impressive to you, consider that the global market for coffee
was reported to be just over $70 billion last year…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Anything, anytime, anywhere. That’s the expectation of today’s mobile subscriber, and “anything” means a great deal more than voice and text. Despite communications networks originally being
conceived to support voice, mobile networks these days are strained more by video than any other service. Delivering reams of streams without significant latency or quality loss is one of the
biggest challenges facing wireless communications service providers (CSPs). Surprisingly, not far behind mobile video as a pain point is the increasing growth of upstream data traffic generated by
mobile cloud applications…
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By: Becky Bracken
The question for enterprises isn’t really “Cloud or no cloud?” anymore. Instead, enterprises today are feeling pressure from employees accustomed to having their work and personal lives
virtualized and available with the flick of a finger. Gartner Research predicts that by 2016 the business process services market will have doubled in size to $145 billion as companies look for new
efficiencies in the way they conduct business.For service providers looking to capitalize on cloud services, the critical question is how to get there…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” —Bill Vaughn Around the world the dawn of a new year signals a time
for resolution, giving us a chance to reflect on the changing landscapes that affect us most. In telecom’s recent history we’ve seen communications needs change dramatically. In 1992, only 3
percent of the US population had cell phones, and the main task for phone companies was to manage my favorite acronym of all time, POTS, otherwise known as plain old telephone service…
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By: Johannes Watzl
Cloud computing, a young, game-changing business, has brought about new opportunities for IT organizations, not to mention service providers and their customers.Supported by the advent of
technologies like virtualization, cloud computing emerged from the world of outsourcing and application services, but in contrast to traditional IT outsourcing, cloud computing offers scalability,
often referred to as flexibility or elasticity available on demand. The scaling is two-dimensional: the number of resources can be increased or decreased at any time and for any length of
time…
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By: Ittai Bareket, CEO of Netformx, Michael
Fitz
Communications service providers (CSPs) have historically focused on making order management for consumer services more efficient, faster and easier to use. Meanwhile, demand for services
provided to enterprises grew quickly as the design and ordering of enterprise services became increasingly complex and was no longer suitable for previously used manual processes relying on
spreadsheets, simplified network diagrams and knowledge trapped in the heads of individuals. This created inefficiencies and the potential for errors in network design and provisioning, which
directly impact profitability; solving this profitability challenge has been imperative as cloud-based and hosted-service deployments continue to accelerate…
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By: Alex Hamerstone
Outsourcing software and software infrastructure maintenance continues to gain popularity as companies look for ways to cut costs without losing capabilities. The expense and effort of
maintaining server and network infrastructure to support software installs, not to mention the labor and costs associated with patches, updates and upgrades, now outweighs the previous trepidation
about cloud-based applications. Furthermore, the cloud provides speed and power to make faster, near-real-time business decisions with higher volumes of data, and it even employs added security
measures to protect enterprise data better than a company can within its own four walls…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Despite doomsday predictions doled out by misinformed armchair Mayan historians, December 21, 2012, came and went, and the earth is still spinning at the same speed. Nevertheless, there were
some significant service interruptions last month that had nothing to do with Mayans or their so-called prophecies. On Christmas Eve Amazon’s east coast cloud servers went down (again), taking
Netflix and Heroku with them. Apparently, there were problems with the Elastic Load Balancing service at Amazon’s data centers…
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By: Tim Young - do not use (default)
“There is a castle on a cloud, I like to go there in my sleep, Aren’t any floors for me to sweep, Not in my castle on a cloud.”—“Castle on a Cloud,” from Les Misérables By the time you read
this, the film version of the famed musical Les Misérables will have probably amassed a few hundred million dollars in box office receipts, and viewers around the globe will have one of its
impassioned solos mercilessly stuck on repeat in their heads for the foreseeable future. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I have been fortunate enough to catch the stage play twice — once in New
York and once in London…
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