The Rise of Competitive Cloud
“Over the last three years we have been investing heavily in solutions that help our customers drive down operational and capital expenditures and tap new sources of revenue” for them, Hayden explains. “Today cloud is poised to be a significant new opportunity at a critical juncture in our customers’ history.”
The cloud opportunity
Mark Levitt, director of enterprise software and communications at Strategy Analytics, wrote in a recent research announcement that the “majority of corporations have abandoned traditional on-premise software deployments for many types of application and infrastructure software. Public and private cloud computing is now the norm, not the exception.” With more and more enterprises electing off-premise solutions, the cloud isn’t the future — it’s now.
The fact is, the cloud appeals to businesses because it allows them to shift investments in infrastructure to innovation and growth. It elevates much of the IT burden and required expertise to run large, complicated infrastructure and allows those resources to focus on key operational issues. The cloud is also a key enabler for new business models so that CSPs can offer virtually anything-as-a-service to help their customers become more profitable and prosperous. Smaller, competitive CSPs can exploit both sides of this equation by both leveraging cloud solutions themselves and offering cloud solutions to their customers
With partners such as Microsoft, technology providers like CHR can help their customers offer a full suite of industry-specific UC&C tools. And with CHR’s hosted OSS and BSS solutions, customers can take advantage of rich operational and business support features without the need to staff and support complex on-premise systems and infrastructure. As they grow, CHR can even help them plan, design and build their next-generation networks to fully capitalize on cloud, data-center and IP services.
“Our goal with partners such as CHR is to build a vibrant ecosystem where our partners provide innovative, industry-specific solutions built on the Microsoft platform,” says Bonnie Jeanne Maher, the company’s industry managing director of telecommunications. “Microsoft recognized cloud as an important trend and has made enormous investments in being cloud ready,” she adds. “Our goal is to provide options so our customers can choose the model which best meets their need, whether that be on-premises, off-premises, public, private, or a hybrid model.”
The competitive cloud
The cloud is here to stay, and many CSPs are clamoring on board. It doesn’t have to be complicated and you don’t need a data center to take advantage of it. With traditional revenues eroding, subsidies declining and the threat of competition increasing, the cloud can be embraced by CSPs to offer rich, hosted services — and virtually infinite service permutations — to their customers. The best part is that they can leverage the expertise, technology and tailored solutions for a fraction of the cost from a third-party provider.
The time to transform is now for CSPs looking to capitalize on the cloud opportunity and replace revenue from traditional telecom services with next-generation services that are tailored to the companies and communities they know so well. The good news is solution providers like CHR are there to help them with their transformation.
