Telecom operators shouldn’t bother trying to build an exhaustive suite of cloud services in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon.com, Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com, says Sean Bergin, head of global telecom markets for Southeast Asia at BT Global Services. That will likely strike most of you as eminently sensible advice.
Instead, access providers should strive to enhance the cloud services ecosystem, Bergin says. “competing head-to-head” with cloud services specialists is pointless,” Bergin said. If you think about the matter for only a very short time, that will make total sense. There’s a reason all software these days is built using an open systems interconnect model that allows different functions to become virtual objects, so developers can innovate within a layer without needing to disturb all the other layers of functionality. See BT: Carriers Should be Cloud Orchestrators.
But that very model also means “network access” is a separate object from “applications.” The fundamental skill sets, forms of organization and points of view are going to vary between software layer “objects.”
Telcos, while able to develop and offer certain services themselves, such as virtual data centers, managed SIP-based communications and videoconferencing offerings, should look at aggregation models that play to their infrastructure strengths. Bergin wasn’t saying “be a dumb pipe,” but he was saying telcos need to stick to what they do best, for the most part. See also http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/04/dumb-pipe-get-over-it.html.
