Web-Scale is the Cloud Opportunity for Carriers

Co-Founder and CTO Randy Bias is in Dublin telling the world’s largest telcos that web-scale cloud is the only way to be successful in the cloud

Carriers have a huge opportunity in the cloud, but only if they embrace the disruption of web-scale cloud and adopt a two-cloud strategy in the short term.

This is the message Randy Bias is delivering at TM Forum Management World in Dublin today. He’s keynoting in the Cloud Services Summit (scroll: “Cloud Provider Business Models for Telcos”) alongside Cloudscaling client Charles Huh of KT. Both are making the case for telcos to include web-scale cloud in their service portfolios:

The “Legacy” architecture that many telcos call cloud is not really cloud. It’s automated and virtualized legacy IT. To be successful, you must also build and deploy web-scale cloud in the model proven by Amazon Web Services and other cloud pioneers. To capture the huge total addressable market available in mobile, web apps, and emerging markets, web-scale cloud is the only path forward.

Randy made this case in an article published earlier this month in the May edition of TM Forum’s Inside Leadership magazine, where he maps out how web-scale cloud meets the textbook definition of a disruptive technology.

The good news for carriers is that implementing a two-cloud strategy is a low risk move. Their experiences with “legacy cloud” deployments have made them see high development and operational costs and long development cycles as the norm for cloud. With web-scale cloud, they’ll find a TCO that is shown to be 3-5x lower than the virtualized and automated legacy IT they’ve been calling “cloud.” Thus, web-scale cloud will deliver much more favorable cost and deployment metrics than they’ve been trained to expect.