Q&A: Gareth Senior on Comptel's Cloud Strategy

Cloud services have the potential to create a whole new line of business for communications service providers (CSPs).  Technology advances, particularly in virtualization and remote communications, are making these new offerings ever more credible, and customers are increasingly intrigued by the potential not only to save costs but also to reduce risk and increase business flexibility.  Meanwhile, businesses and enterprises are looking beyond software as a service (SaaS) and evaluating the benefits of outsourcing substantial parts of their IT environment to the cloud.

But, cloud services are not all bright new dawn and silver lining.  Hear what CTO Gareth Senior has to say on the issues these offerings create and how Comptel is applying its OSS solutions to help CSPs cash in on the cloud.

Q: What challenges do CSPs need to overcome, not only to deliver cloud services efficiently—but also to make some profit from them?

A: Moving into cloud services is not just an incremental change to the CSPs’ portfolios; they bring real challenges. Cloud services have much more in common with IT services and outsourcing than traditional communications services, and customers will view their providers rather differently, too.  For example, enterprises will need demonstrable reassurance that the CSPs can deliver quality of service, performance, security and regulatory compliance.  And of course, since cost reduction is a big driver, they will be extremely price sensitive.  So in order to succeed, CSPs will need to deliver services at least as effectively as their customers could—and definitely more cost effectively.  A tough challenge!

Q: What impact does Comptel see the sale of cloud services having on OSS/BSS?

A: As the services to be delivered are different than traditional services, it will have an impact on traditional OSS/BSS.  Resource management is going to be more IT-orientated than network-focused.  Service management will have to take place in a distributed environment, with services being bundled together from different sources and likely to include communications elements and components from third parties.  In terms of charging for these services, variants on ‘pay as you go’, combined with ‘pay as you grow’ models, are likely, even in business and enterprise propositions.  All of this means that even so-called convergent OSS/BSS could struggle to handle cloud services.

Q: How does the Comptel Dynamic OSS portfolio support CSPs and their end-customers in ‘catching the cloud’?

A: Comptel believes that cloud service providers require a comprehensive ‘concept-to-cash’ and probably even dedicated platform that can handle this very different kind of business.  Comptel Dynamic OSS is well suited to this.  Our products let CSPs:

• Catalog and manage cloud products and services;
• Manage the resources needed to provide cloud-based services, from servers to communication lines, to applications and more;
• Fulfill customer orders, using automated order management processes;
• Monitor and respond to customer activity using pre-defined policy;
• Collect usage information;
• Rate and charge for usage and events; and
• Provide customer and operational visibility of cloud environments.

Comptel is partaking in a number of cloud activities at Management World 2010 in Nice next week, and invites you to join in the industry-wide discussion on making cloud service possible and profitable.  Leave a comment or swing by the company’s tradeshow booth (#21)!