Service choices
One interesting aspect of this is that while network capacity ownership may give carriers an advantage over web-based cloud providers, as well as operators whose network and data center assets are smaller, it also creates an opportunity to make business partners out of them, says Wirt.
"We're intending to take everything we do with our enterprise customers and white-label it for other carriers around the world," he explains. "When you own the biggest subsea cable system in the world, you have interactions with a lot of different companies in various ways, and based on our early successes and conversations with other companies, we believe there's a market for a white-labeling strategy."
If nothing else, he says, Tata's network-powered cloud strategy is already having an impact on how pure-play cloud companies do business with them.
"If you look at a lot of the companies that are classified as cloud companies today, they're starting to buy more like a service provider from us. So the ones that are getting any kind of scale realize the importance of network connectivity in being a cloud services provider and how that makes or breaks their success in the future."
As for the actual cloud services that carriers can offer - IaaS, Paas, SaaS, etc - that will vary from market to market and from one service provider to another, says Munshi of Brocade, which offers a consulting service for telcos designed to help them sort out their service strategy.
"We help customers define what services to offer by defining each service, who the customers are that will pay, why they would pay for a given service, how much they would pay and what industries they come from," he explains. "For example, if you're looking at backup-as-a-service, healthcare wouldn't be a primary industry in the US because of regulatory concerns about security. But media and video services would be key areas to focus on."
Brocade also offers service validation by advising customers what hardware and software they'll need to buy, how to put it together and ROI analysis, Munshi says.
The additional hardware and software is something of a given, says Munshi, as many telcos are unprepared to offer cloud services.
"Many of the carriers we work with now have their own data centers, but they're not at the scale or not at the technology horizon that will not fit a telecom cloud model," he says. "They're either small, or implemented in a way that they need to be technologically upgraded to provide this service infrastructure because it's not only serving the internal population but also facing the end-customers."