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Please contact:
Jeff Claudino
Director of Sales, Insider Research Services
619-229-9940
or via email at:
claudino@lightreading.com |
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| Big Vendors Race to Establish Carrier Cloud Leadership |
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Carrier cloud is an emerging and evolving concept that is not fully defined. It enables telcos to leverage their network ownership to differentiate their cloud infrastructure from first-generation data center-centric clouds, both in terms of economics and features. The end goal of carrier cloud is for operators to own a high performance, highly available and secure, yet low cost cloud infrastructure on top of which they can float what NSN has dubbed "service clouds." Cloud consumers of all types will interact with service clouds, rather than cloud infrastructure as they do today through IaaS. Carrier cloud infrastructure, which will provide elasticity and scalability, will be transparent to service clouds.
Heavy Reading research shows that telcos intend to roll out cloud services and become leading competitors in the cloud market. In the first generation of cloud, based on their standardized and virtualized data center footprint, telcos are up against a formidable pack of rivals, with Amazon as the outstanding example. Not surprisingly, operators are looking for ways to provide a superior version of the cloud that will make them stand out against cloud providers whose data center-centric public cloud offers depend on the Internet.
Operators must advance carrier cloud on a broad front, however. Ericsson identifies two "waves" of cloud that are unfolding together, one (Wave 2) leveraging infrastructure that exists today and the other (Wave 3) is a disruptive leap to an entirely new "cloudified" and converged data center and network infrastructure that will transparently support what NSN is calling the "service clouds" of the future. Cloud consumers of all types will interact with service cloud functionality at the PaaS/SaaS level without worrying about standing up cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, network resources) first.
The vendors profiled in this report recognize that Wave 3 is the future direction for carrier cloud, with consequences for their product portfolios and hardware businesses. Cisco acknowledges, for example, that in the future it will be a software and services company. Vendors are making strategic acquisitions, investments and/or reorganizations to support carrier cloud. But they are moving at different paces and some of them have a larger job than others to adapt, depending on the size of their network portfolios and whether or not they have also chosen to address demand for data center-centric cloud infrastructure. There is a long race to run here and whether the carrier cloud laurels will go to the hares or the tortoises has yet to be seen.
Big Vendors Race to Establish Carrier Cloud Leadership examines the evolving infrastructure for carrier cloud and how five key network equipment vendors are positioned to address it. It describes emerging cloud concepts, including unified cloud management, network "cloudification" and service clouds and dissects network equipment vendor strategies and the threats they face as this market matures.
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| Sample research data from the report is shown in the excerpts below: |
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 Table of Contents (spiti0312toc.pdf) |
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| "Carrier Cloud" is a term being championed by network equipment providers to differentiate clouds delivered to end-users by telcos from the cloud infrastructure supporting services offered by non-network facilities-owning cloud providers. The following excerpt discusses the ways that a telco (carrier) cloud needs to augment the five characteristics of cloud defined by NIST. |
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| [click on the image above for the full excerpt] |
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 Vendors profiled in this report include: Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU); Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO); Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC); Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.; and Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture of Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Siemens AG (NYSE: SI; Frankfurt: SIE). |
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| Total pages: 26 |
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| MAY 2012 |
 Telco Platform as a Service Opportunity |
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| JULY 2012 |
| The Evolving SDP |
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| * Calendar subject to change |
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