The Carrier Cloud – Telco Platform for Enterprise Cloud Computing
November 23, 2011
Alcatel-Lucent has announced their Cloud strategy, targetting telcos to help them integrate their core WAN (Wide Area Network) services with data-centre Clouds and offer this combination as the essential mix needed for the enterprise market.
Their ‘CloudBand‘ product set is intended as a holistic platform that encompasses the network layer as well as the computing one.
As described in the accompanying white paper ‘The Carrier Cloud‘ Alcatel intend this platform to bring the faster-time-to-market benefits of virtualization to the full suite of network, CPE and application hardware that spans across their customers as well as their own IT estates, fundamentally enabling business model innovation…
Enterprise Cloud Computing
They highlight the key point, that Cloud offers an upsell opportunity to offer new products in addition to their core WAN and VPN bandwidth services, adding multi-tenant IT to their existing multi-tenant networks.
This approach is key to understanding and servicing the Enterprise Cloud Computing market, distinguishable from the ‘traditional’ Cloud market in that to date Cloud services have mainly catered for a market of software developers looking for hosting of web applications.
This means i) they’re cost conscious and transaction-driven: They want to swipe their credit card and go, and ii) they don’t care where it’s hosted – All their users are already Internet-based traffic.
In contrast as Alcatel highlight in their paper the Enterprise Cloud market refers to CIO’s looking to apply Cloud benefits to their business-critical applications. This means big apps like SAP, Oracle et al, and where the majority of their users are staff on their own private networks.
This means that instead performance and reliability are more important, the network links between the Cloud data-centre and the office users being the critical success factors, and CIOs are willing to pay for premium services to achieve them. In short this is a second, larger market where telcos are king, whereas Amazon is ruler of the first.
Alcatel have very intelligently defined the distinction between the technologies required for these two different markets, or more specifically, a different class of Cloud service that can now be offered : The Carrier Cloud.
Cloud OSS
The secret sauce for this Alcatel strategy is what they call their CloudBand Management System, which fundamentally offers a synchronized management environment that holistically spans across customer data-centres and WAN as well as the telco’s own Cloud data-centre. This way they can assure end-to-end performance SLAs.
This is defining best practices in “Cloud OSS”, referring to the expansion of traditional telco BSS/OSS models from the telco world, to be applied to this new Cloud paradigm.
The industry authority for these practices is the TMF (TeleManagement Forum), and their Cloud Services initiative applies their deep domain expertise of telco billing architectures to the new Cloud world, defining a ‘Unified Service Delivery’ framework, for utilizing Cloud systems for provisioning automation and management efficiencies.
For example this presentation, Unified Service Delivery Management (40 page PPT), describes a single architecture for IP networks, client-side devices, SaaS collaboration apps like Webex and the new Cloud-driven virtualized data-centre, an “application fluent” WAN that ensure security and QOS, self-service portal and order fulfilment, and via the TMF open standards the ability to automate this across multiple providers, like Qwest and BT in this example.
Alcatel have positioned their platform as an enabler of these practices, and confirmed the enterprise market opportunity for them:
• Carrier-grade public cloud services have 10 times the revenue potential of basic cloud services.
• Carrier-grade cloud services are four times more attractive to enterprises than existing public cloud services.
Exciting times that define this next era of the Cloud Computing market.