Open APIs for Enabling Cloud & M2M Services

Communications service providers (CSPs) are traditionally conservative, more focused on internal product innovation, targets mass-market services rather than niche-oriented. But  CSPs now have a strategic business challenge; they are not growing fast enough. Subscriber numbers are still growing at a high rate in the emerging markets, but this rate is much smaller in developed markets. Here in the Nordics, we see huge competition with brutal price wars and hopeless fight for growing market shares. Meanwhile, competition worldwide has increased tremendously and ARPU (avrg revenue per user) is not keeping pace with the additional network costs associated with modern time, high-bandwidth services like mobile TV, HD video and the likes.

Graph 1- Operators with a commercial web services offering, worldwide

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Cloud, M2M and Big Data for Telcos

One petabyte a day: That’s how much data BMW’s Connected Drive cars will generate by 2017 reckons BMW Group IT infrastructure chief Mario Müller.

I took out this note while listening BMW group’s Cloud presentation at Telecom Cloud Services Summit at Berlin this year. M2M data will need a lot of IT capacity and the data produced by machines will be a real source of revenue. I realized that a lot of Telcos are still confused when it comes to M2M and Cloud business models. Many invested heavily into the infrastructure and getting ready for a big fight against global giants such as Amazon. Well, sure they can differentiate based on their local market demans but I am a bit sceptical to IaaS, except storage, at all.

I realized that when Telcos talk about M2M it was all about providing connectivity and mainly about infrastructure when it comes to the Cloud. None of the CSPs really talked about Big Data yet. I believe enterprises need more than basic connectivity and infrastructure. I think they need a solution, which will help them create business intelligence and value for them. I think big data analytics and ICT business solutions are the future for CSPs.

Around sixty percent of CSPs fear they’ll be bit-pipe providers in the M2M and Cloud market. To avoid this, they must have the ambition to take some more risk and be more innovative. I do not agree at all – as one Telco professional stated on the panel- “telcos are expected to be evolutionary not revolutionary”. Telcos need to better understand the business value of their offers and be more a complete ICT providers, extracting intelligence from the pipe – instead of simply delivering connection from A to B.

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Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the hottest topic to talk about these days between IT people. Some really flatter the words while at the same time some others are a bit gun shy to talk about it. Cloud computing has been seen as a “golden bullet” to use/manage IT. Will it really help IT to be the “GPS of Business”. Are we really there now? As a young IT professional, I decided to give it a try to explain what I personally believe.

I would like to divide the phase into three main group as; Virtualization, Private Clouds (Internal Clouds), Public Clouds. It all started by virtualization of x86 machines. In today’s distributed environments, where up to 85 percent of computing capacity sits idle, there is a tremendous amount of waste, waste that companies no longer can afford. Maintaining current IT infrastructure sucks up about 70 percent of today’s IT budgets while new solutions and capabilities go begging. So, there was a big utilization problem and virtualization solved it successfully. Now, it is a main stream approach and has been already applied by a big portion of the enterprises. The ability to consolidate large server farms and better utilize hardware is a proven route to significant cost savings, and may also assist with corporate green initiatives in reducing CO2 emissions.

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Cloud Computing

Currently I am working on my master thesis on a large-scale ERP systems integration project (a SAP Integration Process project for a large energy company in Sweden). I am still in the early phases of my research but I started to match some terms with the practical things in the real world. It is perhaps a well know truth that the role and impact of IT on today’s organizations has dramatically changed over the last decade. Across a wide spectrum of markets and countries, IT is changing it’s role from “back office” to “strategic”.

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