Tara Seals Blog: Clearing Up the Cloud Might Take a Lot of Wine ... Or Not

Billing & OSS World, Washington, D.C. — Ouch, my aching head. While working way through what seems like an ungodly amount of cheap Sauvignon Blanc last night at the B/OSS World show, I managed to nonetheless have a few coherent conversations about all things B/OSS, including one on cloud services. And though TELUS CTO Ibrahim Gedeon, disparaging the hype on the trend, joked that “after a few drinks the cloud becomes clear,” I’m here to say, not so much.

Sure, we all know what cloud computing is — on-demand, ad-hoc server power, right? But what about cloud services? What makes them “cloud” rather than “online” or “hosted” or “XaaS” or “Web-delivered” or “network-based” (remember that old gem? Usually applied to Centrex. How quaint).
I’m tempted to expose it as a marketing trick of the light (pay no attention to that buzzword behind the curtain!), but I’m not completely convinced it’s just a younger, hipper term for something that’s been around for a long time. But then I’m not unconvinced either.

Yawn alert. I’m about to suck absolutely all the spark out of the term. You’ve been warned. Blame it on my hangover. Blame it on my secret nerd identity. Whatever works.

So, I take cloud services to mean services that are remotely hosted and then delivered via standardized protocols to compatible consumer electronics devices (see? Aren’t you glad I warned you?). And the monetizing of them is of course of critical importance to carriers. Because even if “cloud” is just a new term for something old, what is undoubtedly new is the consumer and business thirst for it, contributing to the meteoric rise of over the top applications. That thirst being driven by ever more mobility and the mash-up of computing and handsets (see, that’s how I define “smartphone.” I’m on a roll). That in turn is of course driving the capacity crunch for operators and resulting network builds. I know none of that’s a newsflash, but it’s important to remember just what a massive sea change we’re experiencing in user behavior, and in carrier business models. Thinking about it too much – about the challenges and the many ways the cloud impacts the operator model – is enough to make things seem a little fuzzy. Maybe it wasn’t the vino after all.

Friday’s closing keynote at the Billing & OSS World Conference will tackle the vagaries of the whole enchilada in a session entitled, perhaps a little optimistically, “Bringing Clarity to the Cloud.” Joe Weinman, strategy and business development vice president at AT&T Business Solutions, and Debra Osswald, global communications industry strategy leader for IBM, will take the stage at 11 a.m. to discuss and debate, followed by a Q&A. I’ll be there and will be reporting back their conclusions. No wine for me this time!