Since our first coverage of the “Telco Cloud”, Appledore Research has emphasized that this is a business model and economics shift, more than a technology shift. Technology is merely the enabler. This is why one of our earliest major research documents investigated “The Economics of Virtualized Networks” and noted that without product innovation and significant operational shifts (automation, on-demand) the promise of the Telco Cloud would be largely unfulfilled.
Virtualization will demand more agility throughout the service provider business, from service creation / innovation through order management, order personalization, flexible charging and immediate provisioning. Yet these same qualities – innovation and micro-segmentation — can be exploited today, as we build toward our necessary future infrastructure.
Appledore Research recently published a paper on this topic, sponsored by a supplier of flexible, catalog driven service-layer OSS, Sigma Systems (thank you). In writing this paper we took the opportunity to show how an investment in flexibility today can pay two significant dividends down the road:
- First, it establishes the infrastructure needed to take advantage of Telco Cloud technology (e.g.: NFV and SDN) as they grow in importance.
- Second, it provides a construct for an incremental, low risk path from today’s environment to a more agile and cost effective one.
Of course, “the devil is in the details”, and some of our suggested best practices are included. We encourage the industry to think not just about virtualization, but about how we transform our businesses and become more agile, more cost competitive and more able to satisfy individuals’ (and niche markets’) wants and needs. One of the most critical take-aways is that we all must focus on the concept of operations logic “re-use”, and how this embodies the principles of DevOps. The “how” is possibly more important than the “what”. This paper provides a good jumping off point, lays out a multi-year direction, and points interested readers (via a bibliography and footnotes) back to the foundational research that underlies many of the concepts and assertions in the paper.
Let’s think about how we make cloud technology more than a shiny technology, and how to exploit it as a driver of true, deep, lasting business transformation.
The full white paper is available, here, for free, as well as from Sigma Systems.
Grant