Thomas Vasen is vice president of product management and marketing at DigitalRoute. Here he explains how CSPs can migrate their systems to reap the internal efficiency advantages of virtualisation. At the same time, however, he sees software in the cloud provided locally and with guaranteed availability as the area of greatest attraction for CSPs seeking to offer cloud propositions to their customers
VanillaPlus: Ideas of telco cloud have the potential to revolutionise CSP operations in two directions – internally and externally. Which is most important and which are CSPs most likely to succeed in, or do both go hand-in-hand?
Thomas Vasen: The internal cloud infrastructure question for the CSP is really just a matter of finding a way to become more efficient and agile, in the process separating software and hardware assets. It’s valuable, but it’s not revolutionary! Any large data centre should be able to address this area. As a result, internal cloud for CSPs is driven by savings and possibly also enabling new technologies to be deployed quicker than before.
Using cloud externally is a much more interesting subject because CSPs have a huge opportunity at their feet. That is, offering access to a secure, end-toend cloud service locally. This involves packaging cloud access with quality of service and security plus a guaranteed working connection. With a local brand you can guarantee that customer data stays local and you can guarantee both customers and authorities that data will not cross a border. These facts allay important market concerns about the cloud, particularly in countries where data protection and sensitivity are a big issue. This means enterprises don’t have to send everything to an Amazon cloud that gives no such guarantee. That’s a big USP for the CSP.
CSPs can start to offer this sort of service easily. For example, a customer of ours is offering cloud as-aservice propositions and uses our MediationZone platform to do metering to measure the resources used in the service platform just as we do the same thing in the network. These measurement points are then metered and mediated to come up with accurate charging.
VP: How do you see operators maximising opportunities to become providers of services in the cloud to their customers? How can they avoid this becoming just another missed opportunity?
Thomas Vasen: The majority of service providers already have hosted offerings built around their capacity services so it is very natural for them to extend these into the cloud. Some CSPs are already successfully doing this but you only typically see traditional PTTs pursuing the opportunity. As an example in Holland you would see KPN do this for sure, but you wouldn’t generally expect to see tier two and tier three operators offer these sorts of services although there are exceptions.
For CSPs to maximise the opportunity, they need to focus on their strengths. This means packaging bandwidth together with a service and then guaranteeing the availability of both. If I was a CSP, I’d work together with a company like Cisco and build a service offering based around on that. That would letme focus on my strengths I’d use my brand to focus on securing the local enterprise customers.
VP: With virtualisation becoming more recognised as a means to generate operational and cost efficiencies, are CSPs really practicing what they are preaching and showing greater willingness to run their operations – or parts of them – in the cloud?
Thomas Vasen: I think all of them want to do this but are much slower getting there than they’d probably like to admit. The majority of CSPs have definitely run virtualisation underneath and the vast majority are using VMware-like technologies in deployments but I would be cautious of stating that they run their BSS on virtualised systems. There’s a long road to go and most CSPs haven’t really migrated to truly virtual environments yet. Of course, this doesn’t mean they won’t.
At DigitalRoute, we see this on the network side as well as in IT. We have a Routing Control solution, which focuses on signalling routing and that runs in virtualised mode as well. More and more operators are interested in a virtualised layer like this sitting between hardware and software. It helps them scale and reduces the maintenance cost.
VP: What role do you see DigitalRoute taking in supporting CSPs in cloud?
Thomas Vasen: We need to address this in three different ways in my view. First, software needs to run in the cloud and we have run software in the cloud for some time. And one needs to be Amazon-compatible in doing this if we want to compete, which we are.
Second, we have to do this efficiently. To that end, we have a clear route mapped out to enable our software to become multi-tenant so it is more efficient and we don’t end up with 100 virtual machines in the cloud. An important point here is to enable local CSPs to monetise cloud strategies by offering cloud to local consumers and to do that efficiently.
The third aspect is to enable cloud deployments for IT applications such as analytics that require a lot of hardware. In these cases it can be highly desirable to go to a provider like Amazon to buy capability for data management but really that would be much better handled by a direct application the CSP controls. DigitalRoute has a solution here. We can facilitate the on loading process and an encrypted version of the data can follow a cloud domain. As a result, you can’t see whom the customer/user is when the data is brought on board. This is a major issue from a security perspective, as I said earlier. So our software is in the cloud, for the cloud and enabling the cloud.
VP: How significant is your Online Control capability for addressing the service management needs of CSPs?
Thomas Vasen:: Very, very significant. Why? Because the biggest problem that CSPs have today – and you can see the frustration at an executive level – is not how to innovate but how to innovate quickly. How do I get a new idea out to customers asap? The problem CSPs have isn’t “what” or “why”, but “when?”
Virtualisation is one way of enabling quick deployment of new infrastructure but quick deployment of new business logic can best be achieved with a flexible integration layer. Our solution sits on the border of network and infrastructure. We’re network-grade, handling all the BSS/OSS event data but at the same time we have the flexibility from the IT side to enable rapid deployment of new use cases in a way that BSS/OSS alone can’t and network systems alone can’t do either.
So our Online Control solutions are very well suited to meeting this particular need and given that CSPs are extremely focused on launching new use cases, you can probably work out why we see Online Control as being a highly significant innovation in the market. For instance, it’s clear to a growing number of people that not all of the cost of transport should be charged to the end user. In certain instances it makes perfect sense having OTT service providers sponsor the transport of certain data. CSPs need the kind of flexible control that can support this sort of innovation in place.
VP: How important does OSS and billing mediation become in making cloud approaches a reality?
Thomas Vasen: I think OSS, or service assurance mediation as we call it, is the challenge to processing a lot of records so you can measure what the service delivered looks like, in real-time. That involves grabbing the right types of records from the right sources, often new ones. Historically service assurance was seen as a luxury add-on and you could launch operations without control but that’s not acceptable anymore in a realtime, online world.
To illustrate this point, Amazon video-on-demand services will, if the users experiences packet loss, re- imburse them. And the customer doesn’t even have to initiate this process. That’s the way CSPs need to start acting towards their customers. It is the way for operators to start to differentiate themselves from each other. They can’t differentiate anymore when many offerings are commoditised and if they continue to compete on price that will just be driven down to nothing. The margins aren’t viable any longer.
VP: To what extent are you seeing CSPs prepare to virtualise their operations and embrace cloud opportunities? Are they truly committing to cloud concepts yet?
Thomas Vasen: I think that on the internal IT side, CSPs are definitely committed to running their infrastructures virtually. There’s no question about it, it’s just a matter of time. They won’t rush to migrate something that’s already working satisfactorily in another way but its eventual replacement will definitely be virtualised when the time comes.
Externally – and personally – I’d like to see a larger push from CSPs on Cloud concepts. I see too little from them in terms of clear service offerings and playing to their inherent strengths. I’m not saying nothing is happening already, but I would like to see quicker progress in this direction.
The question is what are the OTT players going to do? They will probably focus more on applications, such as becoming a provider of the world’s leading CRM system, for example. But how are they going to get that secured in terms of guaranteed bandwidth and delivery? That’s a variation of the debate about whether a content provider like Netflix should pay for its users bandwidth.
VP: How has DigitalRoute developed as a company to address the changed needs of the market and how do you see CSPs and their cloud activities maturing in the next few years?
Thomas Vasen: DigitalRoute is adjusting and adapting its technology to ensure we’re compatible with how the market is evolving. We’ve had an early start and feel very much on top of what’s trending, as our Online Control solutions and the recent launch of Service Control suggest. As far as a business model, we’ve been working with various partners such as NSN, Logica and SAP on a hosted analytics solution for CSP data. It’s through these partnerships that we enable their apps by providing the required access to the CSP networks and data that we think represent the best way forward for growth. We have over 300 customers deployed whether direct or through partners and we think this base will stand us in good stead into the future. We’re growing with their needs, if you like.
So to summarise, I see CSPs taking virtualisation for granted when they do a gradual migration of IP systems and I see at least the tier ones, which are used to providing a large variety of services, investing more in cloud offerings. In the latter case, as I’ve said, I think building on a unique, local position will be key.
