Adan Pope, chief technology officer and chief strategy officer at Telcordia, will be speaking on the service-provider role in cloud computing at the B/OSS Live! event in June. Here, he spoke with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott about how the business of cloud is shaping up and how service providers can prove their worth in its delivery.
Hyp
e vs. Reality: Reality Wins
"We expect a hype curve to the introduction of any new technology. But we are coming down to an understanding of what the classifications of cloud-based services are now. I don’t think that was very well solidified until mid last year. In terms of infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, opaque clouds, transparent clouds, cloud-based services, everyone was jockeying for a position in the market place and to find their unique value. I think we are passed that point. We now see a fundamental economic driver. Computational infrastructure and network infrastructure are expensive to acquire. If you can find a way to drive up utilization and use it in a more flexible manner, there would be economic payback."
What Makes Cloud a Reality?
"Fighting against this reality is the common commoditization and reduction in cost for acquiring new infrastructure. It is still costly, but not as costly as it used to be. But you still have to turn it up, put it in a facility, provide care and feeding, upgrade the software, etc. So we are trying to find that right balance between utilization of costly but declining hardware infrastructure against a not-declining operations cost. Even if the hardware became free sometime in the future, which it won’t, current models have very high operational costs and relatively rigid utilization of those assets. So at a high level there are fundamental economic forces driving cloud, we just have to find a way to be more flexible in utilizing its infrastructure.
"Those drivers point less to computational infrastructure and less to connectivity-oriented services and more toward flexible utilization, flexible exposure, and flexible policy-based management of resources. We now have a classification system that makes sense; we now understand the economic drivers regardless of whatever offer each provider or player in the supply chain is putting forth. We know they all face similar economic drivers for the value proposition."
Telcordia’s Approach
"From Telcordia’s point of view it comes down to an ability to take advantage of this opportunity to really flexibly assign, allocate, partition, deliver on policy-controlled infrastructure, manage infrastructure and be able to provide a myriad of services to the marketplace. More and more we see [the requirement] for flexible service delivery and a more flexible charging and policy management of services.
"Last year we talked about the telco service factory where service providers would sell a variety of services at a variety of granularities. Some people think service providers’ value is only on conveyance. Well, it is easy to talk about that from a historic point of view because that is one of the things they do and will continue to do, but we see them providing conveyance in conjunction with computational resources and infrastructure-as-a-service as well as access and conveyance to a content delivery network complete with service level agreements.
