Heads in the cloud

Declining revenues, economic challenges, technology transformation and price competition are all contributors to the rapidly changing telecom industry alongside the evolving requirements of customers. As telecom operators look to transform to overcome these challenges, the cloud has become ever more important. The cloud enables telecoms to support businesses and consumers in our anywhere, anytime culture. It also enables them to reinvent their business and their role in this technology transformation. Support for digital services, the Internet of Things (IoT), next generation services and even Over The Top (OTT) cloud services are major opportunities for telecoms.
Read more

We love helping telcos solve their cloud headaches. It might be because they want to offer a new service or make the most of cloud like their competitors or because they have already tried a strategy that hasn’t worked and now they need a fast and easy solution. Whatever the reason, we are in the business of helping telcos orchestrate their cloud so they can capture the market opportunity.
Read more

Fortunately for all of us, we have noticed that cloud washing is dying down. However, on the other hand, we have also noticed ‘cloud orchestration’ washing is on the rise. Over the last six months, there have been many announcements on new orchestration solutions most likely because people now recognize you cannot truly have a cloud services market offer without it.

So how does a service provider tell the difference between ‘cloud orchestration washing’ where a vendor puts together a few bits and pieces and names it orchestration vs. a true cloud orchestration solution?

Here are eight questions you should ask your cloud orchestration vendor before signing on the dotted line.

Read more

Storage is a widely recognized major, if not main, infrastructure challenge. For many years, service providers could choose only between two network-storage options: local or centralized.

• Local – With local storage (i.e., disks with the server node), the only way service providers could ensure service continuity was to replicate all data to other devices that could be used in the event of failure. This model did not accommodate all workload types, nor did it adapt to legacy applications. Local storage afforded service providers very little flexibility when managing their storage spaces. It also made live recovery a considerable challenge.
• Centralized – While centralized network storage (e.g., a Storage Area Network [SAN] or a Network Attached Storage [NAS]) afforded service providers the flexibility and control they needed to deliver storage services, it delivered all resiliency via expensive hardware components, thereby driving up CAPEX and OPEX investments, with SAN and NAS typically being a single point of failure.

Read more

Cloud orchestration has been named one of five enabler technologies by Deloitte in its Tech Trends 2014 report. An enabler technology is where companies have already invested time and effort, but it warrants another look because of new developments or opportunities.

The report discusses primarily what the CIO and enterprise needs to do to orchestrate the cloud. Because we are service provider focused, here are the relevant points we think you’d find most interesting.  

Established cloud providers are creating storefronts of complementary cloud solutions, which make choosing and buying an expanding inventory of services easier. But we are still in the early days of this expansion, and integration often remains the buyer’s problem. Over time, technical compatibility within a vendor’s stack should become less challenging.  

Read more