Significant operational hurdles for telco cloud services, says Ovum

KUALA LUMPUR:Despite being well-placed to take
advantage of the burgeoning cloud computing market, telcos face
considerable challenges when it comes to supporting and selling cloud
services, according to Australia-based Ovum.
In a new report titled “Enabling Telco Cloud Services’ released on Monday, July 25, Ovum saidthat the operational hurdles telcos face to make a success of cloud services were ‘significant’.
Ovum analyst Mark Giles said much had been made of the potential for
telcos to leverage existing assets, such as their communications
networks, data centres, OSS and BSS systems and existing customer
relationships, to offer cloud services to enterprises.
“However, while telcos’ assets do provide them with some key
advantages over other cloud providers, there are a number of significant
challenges that they face.
“Aside from a perceived lack of brand identity in the supply of IT
services, obstacles such as bringing internal network and IT teams
together, enabling sales teams, and ensuring that OSS and BSS systems
can deliver on cloud’s on-demand nature must be overcome,” said Giles.
He said the pace of innovation required for cloud services was very
different from traditional network services and requires telcos to
drastically reduce their time to market.
While this was a challenge for the back office, it also raised
questions as to how telcos price and monitor the profitability of these
services, he said.
According to the report, telcos should follow the lead of players
such as SFR and Telstra by seriously considering a joint branding,
marketing and even sales partnership with an existing IT services player
to maximize their potential impact in the market.
“In addition to helping them overcome their internal operational
challenges, a partnership can help telcos to expand their number of
sales channels and profit from an association with a premium IT services
brand,” said Giles.