How to Win with Telco Cloud Services

As the cloud has matured over time, so too have customer expectations of the technology. These days, buyers expect a fully-fledged business solution from their cloud providers, rather than the simpler Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and virtualization offerings of the past. This means that some telco service providers might run into some trouble in the future when they are overlooked in favor of solutions that offer more than just servers and storage. A recent article on the Economic Times lays out the problem telcos face rather succinctly. But I’ve thought of three ways telcos could respond to them.

Adding value

It won’t be enough for telcos to simply expand their IaaS offerings; they would be going toe-to-toe with giants like Google and Amazon who benefit from massive economies of scale. They need to start adding value, not just size. One way they could do this is by developing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings—or partnering with someone who already has.

A platform to stand on

PaaS is a great way to add value to existing IaaS offerings.A PaaS allows customers to leverage the power of an IaaS by adding a layer over it. In the case of Progress® Pacific™, this includes data connectivity tools Progress® DataDirectCloud™ and Progress® Easyl™ as well as our rapid application development platform Progress® Rollbase™.

Tools like these make taking advantage of a cloud infrastructure far easier than more traditional methods such as virtualization, which require new virtual machine instances to be created for each user. Additionally, things like operating systems and compatibility must be primary concerns in virtualization. PaaS offerings like Pacific, on the other hand, are designed for the development of “cloud-native” applications. That means that compatibility need not be a concern because the tools the PaaS provides are designed to make apps that will run for certain on that platform, and the platform is designed to be accessible from anywhere.

Strength in numbers

What telcos really need is a vehicle to market. That vehicle could easily be a partnership with an established PaaS provider. Progress already has a strong ecosystem of more than 2,000 partners, and is making strides into the rapid application development and PaaS market. In addition, Pacific supports a variety of deployment options including public, private, and hybrid cloud choices. Partnering with Progress could give a telco the opportunity to sell their cloud infrastructure services with the added value Pacific brings.