Because telcos will have to coordinate with multiple parties to deliver or to participate in the delivery of compelling cloud services, they also have to understand how a new breed of problems presented by the cloud can impact their cash flow and profitability. "If you have multiple parties participating in a service and $5 in compensation to splice up multiple ways, understanding how compensation, settlement and cash flows are viewed by all partners is very important. If the operator is the one responsible for breaking an SLA, it helps to know ahead of time what penalties exist," noted Swartz.
Today, that determination is rather difficult, as most billing solutions focus on consumers rather than the currently underserved enterprise market. There is some irony in that consumer billing continues to become consumerized and simplified to support offerings in gaming, content and subscriptions, yet the settlements, compensation and revenue sharing side is getting proportionately more complex, even though it is considered a consumer business on the retail side of the equation.
Because the value chain in B2B requires more complex terms and negotiations, this is a time that will prove either problematic or opportune for telcom operators, which now have a chance to mix and match computing, storage, and software in B2B-focused "mash ups" that can spawn value-add packages, and hence more stickiness and loyalty.
Empowering the enterprise
Building stickiness in the enterprise is difficult today, as many enterprise customers remain confused about whether they negotiated the right price for what they actually used. And, similarly, cloud providers are often doubtful they can adequately predict how much to charge enterprise customers to effectively cover the cost of delivering cloud services to them every month.
Dynamic billing capabilities are needed that empower enterprise customers to have visibility into bandwidth, storage, transaction costs and service fees so that they better understand the cost, quality and performance of services they consume in the cloud.
With all of their experience and architecture, it would seem telcos already have what it takes to differentiate and build loyalty over those with best-effort infrastructure. But to go the next step in terms of differentiation, operators need to move toward granular metering as an essential part of billing for cloud services.
Since metering often is a primary source of data for determining charges and chargebacks in a pay-per-use model, it should trace activities according to a user or product or service.
That means per-user charging must become a reality, with enterprise users given the tools they need to clearly see what their usage was and what they were charged and why (through easy-to-use dashboards or APIs.)
The reality, however, is that most cloud providers - telco and otherwise - lack "standard" mechanisms or metrics for metering, which continues to lead to confusion for customers as to what is a cost or charge in one facet of an organization might not be in another. Metering should evolve to enable operators to measure and open visibility to the use of resources of all types, even if they are not important for cost purposes. There has to be recognition that there are people within the enterprise that look at more than just cost, as they are responsible for understanding performance and quality or capacity planning issues - depending on if it's a user in engineering, marketing, finance or other facets of an enterprise.