Carriers, Performance, and Connections

There are three things that I've been thinking about lately:

1. Performance management for cloud computing,
2. Cloud computing and carriers (i.e., telecom companies such as telephony and cable), and
3. The connection between the two.

The level of interest in what carriers are doing has been sufficient to warrant the attention of industry analysts and entire conference tracks devoted to discussion of the impact carriers are having on cloud computing. Depending on your perspective, you're probably in one of two camps: those who think carriers are too large, slow, and generally old school to offer cloud computing solutions, and those who think carriers are well placed to run them. For simplicity, let's call them cloud carriers. I know, a bit cheesy.

Carriers are typically thought of as large organizations that are not as agile as smaller organizations. The common analogy is that of trying to turn the Titanic on a dime: not so easy. Yet, here are organizations that have a wide ranging clientele that includes the likes of governments (federal, state, provincial, municipal), educational institutions and large enterprise, as well customers in the the mid and mass market segments. Not to mention that they have the scale available to fund and staff product development projects of the scale required to develop and launch cloud based services. This puts them in a unique situation with respect to offering end-to-end services ranging from customer premise equipment, connectivity, data centre, hosted servers, and all manner of cloud based services. Cloud computing, is not a huge stretch when taking this into consideration.

For many organizations, performance management forms a core part of their service delivery strategy. However, these same organizations don't typically control much of the infrastructure that is used to deliver their services beyond the edge of their network; non-core services are offered by various vendors such as ISPs, data centre providers, etc., which makes resolving problems more challenging because there are more intermediaries that affect the service. Throw in the various SLAs that are contracted, and the effective SLA drops to below the lowest contracted SLA.

Since carriers are able to offer a range of services, they are in the unique position of being able to address performance problems globally making it easier for customers to obtain assistance and becoming the proverbial "one throat to choke". Several carriers have already made bets that their customers will buy cloud based services from them and have either acquired smaller service providers or invested in the technologies and infrastructure required to deliver those services.

Despite the fact that AWS has clearly claimed the lead in the cloud service provider market, it is too early to count out carriers: they have the hallmarks of an integrated service provider as well as the means to deploy services and support them. Look to carriers to make an even bigger push into cloud services in the next few years.