As telcos strive to differentiate themselves and become cloud service providers, the need to differentiate themselves and provide stickiness is ever more apparent.
Rather than just storage and compute, which is becoming a commodity, it is flexibility and orchestration that is the differentiating factor.
Today, many service providers in Asia are exploring the waters and designing and commissioning state of the art designs that will shake up the market when the come online over the next six to nine months.
Paul Serrano, Riverbed’s Senior Director for Marketing APAC and Japan was recently in Bangkok launching Granite, Riverbed’s new storage over WAN acceleration solution. He explained how analysts have put the market for the public cloud at $100 billion by 2017. Of that, Software as a Service will be around $25 billion and of that $25 billion, his company is a significant player in providing the infrastructure to make it happen.
Today service providers such as SingTel, Pacnet, AT&T, Verizon and many others provide their managed services through Riverbed equipment. In all 35% to 40% of Riverbed’s revenue comes from service providers in the region.
Riverbed has three plays for the service provider to consider.
First is its partnership with Akamai in which it will provide acceleration for three of the most popular cloud apps - Google Apps, Salesforce and Office 365. Using the Akamai network alone, even without acceleration, typical ping times go down from 85 ms to 25 ms just based on more efficient routing. Adding acceleration makes the apps feel even faster. Acceleration for other services will be considered on an opportunistic basis.
Second is orchestration. Service providers can offer services so that extra compute resources can be automatically fired up when needed but in a way that is not locked in to Amazon AWS or VMWare ESXi.