Cloud To The Rescue...

To the readers, I recount a real life story of how cloud based applications had saved the skin of my mate in the garment industry, in beating the power cut..and making his day. This is what I mean by the power of the cloud. Enjoy reading.

"It was last sunday evening when a very important video conference was scheduled at 9 pm SL time with me, my designer in SL, and the clients in the US. My designer had finished his layout, and I was busy making the presentation on work/delivery and financial schedule in my PC. Just at around 8:45 pm there was a power cut in our woods, and after many a call was able to get to the Electricity provider call centre. Just the usual, keep your fingers crossed power will be back in no time, was the answer. It was too much of a risk in banking on the guys, and the risk of rescheduling the con-call for another day would have resulted in lost business.

Knowing that most of our apps and data are synchronized in our intranet and with a cloud provider in the US, I had a dart to the local coffee shop (coffee bean) with my laptop and iPhone. Luckily there was generator power. I got connected to the WiFi (free of course), and connected upto the company VPN. Lo and behold I was able to salvage my Sharepoint Portal and power point files and I seamlessly re-scheduled the con-call to start at 9:15pm to recover on lost time due to the power episode. The Webex was hosted in the cloud somewehere in the US.

At 9:15 pm pronto I had a call back to my VoIP client on my laptop. Since my VOIP number was configured on my laptop and iPhone, I had the option of either using the iPhone or laptop, but decided on the latter. The Webex was synched to the cloud based VOIP service provider, for voice/data archival and I was told for company compliance. So there I started my presentation with my designer, and the clients in US, on a wet and quiet Sunday evening in colombo, whilst sipping a Caffe Mocha. The only damage was the Rs. 400/= for the caffe mocha".

Google TV...Is this the next best thing to happen to TV

Google has launched "smart" TV, a service that merges surfing on the Internet with surfing TV channels. The technology company has joined forces with Sony, Intel and Logitech International. Google wants to turn televisions into giant monitors for Internet browsing so it can make more money selling ads (todayonline.com).

Google has built a consortium of key partners, i.e. Best Buy, Logitech, DISH network, Adobe, and Intel to take this concept of the Web to TV a reality, and as per DISH web site, the service with Google integration is slated this fall in the US.

The Logitech Set Top Box receiver presumably having a high degree of influence from Intel ATOM processors, Adobe and the Android OS in the way that the content is presented in an admixture of TV and Web, and further, the google search engine technology giving an interface to search and correlate content of the TV and Web, the question of how Open..Is Open? comes into mind. Where as Apples has been driven by the notion of One device (iphone,ipad), One technology (AMD,xcode,Objective-C), and one Appstore (for third party development)...Google is driven by a philosophy of opening the O/S, and API/SDK centric development environment for third party app developers. Obviously leveraging some of their own core products, such as you-tube, Google Maps, G-Mail and G-Talk etc.

From a TV perspective, how open is this ? In light of the above development the following points in my view is really relevant

(1) How open is this platform, to embrace many other STB and OEM manufacturers (where some of them may be non INTEL based) eg. Ant,Microsoft which are widely used.

(2) Can the search technology be extended at the point of content ingestion. Eg. what your Friends in FB thought about a scene in an on demand movie. Replying your comment back to your wall about the VoD.

(3) How will this influence standards such as IMS, OpenIPTVforum which are founded on voice,video and internet convergence.

(4) Can search be integrated to the MPEG4 meta-data layer.

These are few of the points which lurk in my mind...is this the next best thing to happen to TV...your guess is as good as mine.

Cloudifying everything...Telco

Cloud based computing and the 'As A Service' business models has been the buzz around the ICT industry. It is evident that IT companies are cloud basing their core products to be abreast in the trend, by taking the risk and challenges, and most importantly to be ahead in the competition and differentiating their product offering. To name a few are ; salesforce.com, broadsoft, webex, zimbra etc.

Cloud computing is defined as "A collection of IT enabled resources and capabilities that can be delivered over the Internet As A Service". So what role do Telco's play in cloud computing...

Telco's who have the first mover advantage in setting up there IP networks have invested in iDC, for their infrastructure hosting and also, upsell to customers as a hosted/co-located service for their business VPN customers. The Application Service Provider (ASP) business started from there albeit very slowly. At present the Telco is presented with Cloud/XaaS as a new business model which they could map onto there IDC infrastructure. One of the service providers who has made this move is Telstra, using the T-Suite platform to Aggregate/Deliver and Manage services to there customers using the SaaS model, which is delivered using a platform named Jamcracker. Telstra's T-Suite have the following business objectives ;

(1) Further monetize broadband investment through service differentiation

(2) Expand markets without expanding networks

(3) Expand business models for future earnings growth

SaaS is opined to be a superior business model, as the proponents argue, from cost to technology to scale. It delivers rapid time to deployment/value, Faster innovation cycles, highly scalable, reduced cost structure by leveraging a single platform..

In this competitive environment where the Telco's are faced with diminishing margins, and the the daunting task of protecting the customers in the face of high churn, is SaaS not the correct position for a Telco to be in for their core products and services.

Now let us look at the possibility of cloudifying the Telco operational process. From the perspective of an IP/NGN environment we could look at the network elements delivering the following attributes;

(1) Setting the QoE/QoS attributes pertaining to the service the customer requires

(2) Overall managing the resource requirements at the core, aggregation, access and service layer in terms of (a) Quality of Service Management (b) Number and Port management (c) Security Management (d) Signalling Management (e) Service Management

(3) Operational Support System and Billing Support System

(4) CPE management using protocols such as TR069 and DLNA

Imaging going to a web store (SaaS Marketplace) and purchasing an IPTV connection, and imagine the provisioning enablement cutting through all above four layers in order to give seamless service to the customer...and imagine the customer just needs to connect the STB/CPE to the port to seamlessly connect to the service and enjoy the service. Just as SaaS'ing the CRM/ERP this I say is SaaS'ing the Telco product offering.

What really portends well, is the ability to expose the Telco services (assuming all constraints are met), to a huger marketplace surpassing from a local presence to a global presence. This augurs well for the Telco industry. Is this is distinct possibility...

Key Challenges in a Telco environment are

(1) How to be abreast in Technology while balancing the Investment/Return on Capital Employed

(2) How to achieve operations and sevice excellence in a competitive environment

(3) And most importantly...What Business/Markets we are in....

IMS vs. Web 2.0

With adoption of NGN based soft-switch technology by service providers, in transcending from TDM to IP environment primarily due to cost-based approach, service providers are still at cross roads as to what service strategy they have to embrace. IMS technology espoused by the Telco standardisation bodies such as ETSI vs. the rapidly adopted 2.0 based technology complementing the VoIP standard as against the IMS VoIP standard. Typically the lowest cost and rapidly adaptible and market/centric service platform will win the day. But will that be the case...

This blog presents the multi faceted approach and highlights in the Telco and ICT industry on the new technology, particulary based on IMS and Web/Telco 2.0, with personal criticques and industry analysis...