Telecoms demand gets cloudy

In a new report, the independent telecoms analyst claims that wholesale telecoms providers are set to benefit from growing consumer and business demand for cloud-based services, provided by a new breed of enterprise.

Paris Burstyn, report author and Ovum analyst, said: “A growing number of companies that serve businesses and consumers feed the demand for the cloud. They purchase telecoms services on the scale of small-to-medium carriers from wholesale telecoms carriers.

“This means wholesalers are poised to experience a boom because as these intermediary companies experience increasing demand for their products and services, wholesale telecoms suppliers have the opportunity to grow with them.

“There are also new intermediary companies constantly emerging. As businesses and consumers demand a wider range of cloud services and become more reliant on them, new companies emerge to meet their needs. Together this means that wholesale telecoms revenues will experience growth over the next few years.

“But wholesale telecoms service providers must take advantage of this growth and invest in human and technological resources to capture the new business.”

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.

Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers, and typically include service level agreements (SLAs). The major cloud service providers include Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Salesforce, Amazon and Google.