There is a massive opportunity for telcos in the cloud – a hungry audience waiting to be engaged exists, but at the same time existing customers are ready to switch and are under threat from competitors. For telcos, there is an urgent need to implement effective action now.
And while there is the ugly side of telcos in the cloud, the great news is that telcos hold the crown jewels of cloud.
Constraints to success in the cloud are therefore not resource related, however they have been produced from traditional, external influences. Four come to mind:
- Telco procurement processes have been a barrier to engaging and selecting solutions that are best suited to the needs of the emerging cloud market than traditional vendor solutions. This has meant that telcos have not been exposed to service provider ready solutions developed by ISV’s that have emerged alongside the cloud market.
- Traditional large tech vendors have promoted their existing portfolio of solutions which have not been cloud ready. These vendors have taken a consultancy led approach to solution development and implementation to the detriment of the telco.
- Analyst models and advice is future focused including specifying capabilities that have barely emerged as commercially viable customer requirements. This continues to result in telcos over-specifying and over-complicating their project requirements. This causes significant delays in all stages of project development and out of control project costs to deliver functionality that has little or no customer demand.
- Analysts were slow to recognize the limitations of existing tech solutions, the value of public and hybrid-cloud models and the need for ‘cloud ready, service provider solutions’. Early advice from analysts did not fit the cloud market opportunity that has emerged.
We should therefore not be surprised with poor results, slow implementation and massive project costs. The challenge is to make the crown jewels matter for telcos. That means getting a plan in place to use these crown jewels to a telcos advantage.
So ask yourself has the cloud moved your business forward in any significant way? Look at what the actual impact has been from cloud on your revenue stream. Then consider what it could be… Download the eBook, which looks at The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Telcos in the Cloud. A quick read, you’ll learn what to look forward to and what to fear in the cloud with advice on how to overcome the bad and the ugly of telcos in the cloud to position yourself for true nirvana.
