So here in 2011, we have the same challenge with cloud. (The majority of) Dell’s customers do not know how to operate a hyperscale data center because there is no commonly accepted pattern. That’s where the cloud operation model comes into play – we have cloud proven hardware and cloud proven software, but we had been missing a description of the operational cloud mojo.

IDC forecasts that over the next five years, Asia Pacific spending on IT cloud services will grow fourfold, reaching USD$ 4.6 billion by 2014. Spend on cloud computing will accelerate through the forecast period, with a forecasted CAGR of more than 40% across the region from 2010 – 2014¹. InstaCompute will free up considerable financial and managerial resources in the transition from a capex-heavy, on-premise model, to a pay-as-you-use model with hourly and monthly billing options and the choice of multiple payment methods. Customers can focus their energies on pursuing revenue generating growth opportunities, from their core business areas, while relying on Tata Communications to deliver the technology infrastructure to support their growth.

Since I could not find anything, I decided to try to estimate the annual new datacenter construction market size using existing data already available in the industry. My calculations resulted in a projection out to 2020 that I believe is fairly representative of what we can expect. In addition, I also made the assumption that the industry will likely move from an average construction cost of $15 million per megawatt to something more like $6 million per megawatt in five years resulting in a flattening of year-over-year growth. The resulting white paper is titled Projecting Annual New Datacenter Construction Market Size. It also shares the steps I took to generate these projections and estimates that the United States and global datacenter markets will grow 50 percent or so by 2020 to $18 billion and $78 billion, respectively. These estimates were derived by combining my own data with the great work of my good friend Jonathon Koomey, and some of the initial Uptime Institute’s work o

Do Enterprise Clouds have a future? Yes, but they'll ultimately tend towards niche (specific classes of SLAs, network speeds, security requirements etc). Their role is principally in mitigating disruption risks but the transitional costs they seek to avoid can only be done at an increasing operational penalty. It should be noted that there is a specific tactic where an enterprise cloud can have a particularly beneficial role: the "sweating" of an existing legacy system prior to switching to a SaaS provider.

Do Private Clouds have a future? Yes, they have a medium to long term benefit in mitigating transitional risks (such as issues over data governance) through the use of a commodity based model. However, be careful what you're building and remember the impact of private clouds will diminish as competitive markets develop in the public space with easy switching between providers.

Do Public Clouds have a future? Absolutely, this is the long term economic model and will become dominant

There are two dimensions to this. Structural i.e. do telcos have relevant assets that would enable them to capture value going forward? And then cultural – are telcos capable of the DNA reset needed to compete with their emergent competitors (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc.)?

In my experience (W. Europe centric), telcos spend a lot more time agonising about the former while shying away from the latter. If they were smarter, they would do it the other way around.

Telcos themselves probably believe they devote plenty of management attention to the question of disintermediation. Every few months senior managements ask the question – the only thing that seems to change over time being the identity of the potential disintermediator (first Skype, then Google, then Apple, now Facebook) – and junior managers scurry away to look at the data, and then come back with the reassuring conclusion that with a bit of added effort, telcos can capture value by exploiting 'unique' assets like location, bill

This is a graph of traffic to the website of the Australian Open tennis championship. As you can see, the traffic spikes in January every year and then all but disappears for the other 11 months of the year. It is also important to note that the height of the traffic spike is increasing year on year.

If the owners of this site want to be able to serve all the traffic at the top peak of the peak, they can spend a fortune on servers capable of handling that level of traffic but these servers will be almost entirely idle for eleven months of the year. The alternative is that the owners put the site on a cloud platform and dial up the resources associated with it, as and when needed. This is obviously a vastly more efficient option for the site owners. However, that doesn’t mean that cloud computing itself is Green or efficient.

According to London-based market research firm, Informa Research, an average smartphone (globally) consumes a mere 85 megabytes of data every month. Nearly 13 percent of world’s phones qualify as smartphones, and these phones are generating two-thirds of all traffic on mobile cell networks, Informa notes. For instance, so far in 2010, an average iPhone user consumes 196 megabytes of data each month, while an average Android phone consumes about 148 MB per month.

Informa predicts that over next five years, there is going to be a staggering 700 percent increase in data consumption every month. Actually, I think they’re being conservative, and it might not take that long. T-Mobile USA CTO Neville Ray turned me on to the concept of a Gigabyte phone earlier this month when we were chatting about industry developments.

A Gigabyte phone is one that pushes monthly data consumption to a gigabyte or higher, mostly because people use the wireless web more frequently. Sharing photos, watching vi

Ray pointed out that during this holiday season, T-Mobile USA would have twice the number of Android devices for sale in comparison with other U.S. carriers, a sign perhaps, that BlackBerry and Nokia might be on weak footing with the Bellevue, Wash.-based phone company. According to research reports earlier this month, Android-based smartphones are now 44 percent of the U.S. market, crushing RIM’s BlackBerry OS. According to Canalys, Symbian (with Nokia being its main proponent) has 33 percent of the worldwide smartphone market. Canalys noted that Apple pushed ahead of RIM, which has seen its share of the total smartphone market decline.

Yesterday I wrote about the concept of a Gigabyte phone, something Ray talked about extensively in a conversation with me. “We’re seeing now the emergence of the gigabyte-per-month smart phone, which is very, very exciting and a great opportunity,” he said. “You’re seeing some of these very capable smart phones emerge, and in several cases, we’re seei

AWS’s claim to fame in the cloud computing arena has been the hyper-elasticity and minuscule price-points of its IaaS solutions, which are bolstered by a myriad of third-party tools vendors. These services have primarily appealed to tech-savvy users, large and small, willing to cobble together these on-demand, online resources to meet their situational computing needs.

Verizon is countering with a bundled program which promises greater ease-of-deployment and more management control for SMBs with less hard-core technology skills and those more comfortable doing business with service providers they know.

Amazon (AMZN) continues to challenge the tech industry’s computing norms by offering increasingly frictionless service delivery and spot-pricing for its cloud computing capabilities. The most recent example is its new EC2 Micro Instances low cost option for low throughput applications.

Unable to match AWS on price, Verizon (and other major players such as IBM, AT&T (T), etc.) is betti

Some CIOs continue to be skeptical about the public cloud while others are willing to put at least their messaging on it (UB's putting its e-mail on Microsoft BPOS). However, security is no longer cited as a bugbear. What is mentioned, however, is the threat of cross-country legislation if the service provider offering cloud services is located in another country or continent. A possible solution is to simply engage with a local provider. Airtel, Reliance Communications and Tata Communications are all offering cloud services.

When it came to DR, the talk was around how, although the common perception is that recovery is instantaneous or near enough, in the real world it can take anything from 30 minutes to six hours to recover some semblance of normality. The assembled IT heads talked about the difficulty of persuading their bosses to accept the need for DR before a disaster strikes, at which point the board is yelling for putting a DR in place yesterday.

Talking about telecom, some

Today about 70 percent of Microsoft engineers are doing work related to the cloud, including people in Microsoft's Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group. We expect the number continue to grow in the future."

Paulo Simões, TMN's head of R&D, and whose role includes advising Portugal Telecom (PT) on its SDP platform and vendor choices, told attendees at the SDP Global Summit (including many vendors) that many suppliers are not in tune with carriers' needs.

He said PT, which already uses a number of SDPs for different parts of its business, had recently issued a RFI (request for information) from the SDP community, and had received responses from 26 vendors. Those responses, he noted, included many that were too narrow and not aimed at dealing with his Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) requirements. (See The SPIT Manifesto.)

"Many [vendors] are focused just on mobile, or just on fixed. Some have no development roadmaps, and some had no charging functions for their SDP nodes," said the PT man, who added that current SDPs are also proprietary, which doesn't help with long-term planning or cost control, and many comprise multiple boxes that form specific functions rather than bein

OpenStack for Cloud, Explained!
Open-source software for cloud computing will advance cloud standards and allow for more in the way of choice. Hooray.

Perspectives on Cloud Computing: What is Telecom’s Role?

Wednesday, September 29th at 12:00 PM

Everyone in the Telecom and IT industries seems to have their heads in the Cloud. It’s a feeding frenzy these days. But according to Gartner, there is “real benefit rather than hyped expectations and potentially transformational technologies that will hit the main stream in less than five years”.

What does that mean for us and how can we tap into it? Info World recently compiled a rough breakdown of what cloud computing is all about from an IT perspective. Components included: SaaS (software as a service), utility computing, web services in the cloud, platform as a service, MSP (managed service providers), service commerce platforms and internet integration.

I have just spent a week in Korea and Japan meeting with customers on the subject of Cloud. I can tell you, the subject is red hot out there right now…I believe telco’s have a unique opportunity today to work with enterprises in these areas. Not only will it help them increase the traffic in their networks, but it will also allow them to foster long-term relationships with their customers. When interviewed about their fears concerning the public cloud, CIO’s are typically highlighting security and availability as two key issues. Traditional public cloud providers do not provide satisfactory service level agreements. Telco’s wanting to deliver cloud services to their customers can easily do that by using high speed interconnects between their datacenters. They can run that on their existing fiber channels with limited extra investments, making 99.99% SLA’s in reach of any customer. Also as they are local, they can ensure those datacenters are within the appropriate boundaries for compli

Launched 2005, GE's now familiar Ecomagination campaign has seen green sales quadruple, accounting for about $20 billion in annual sales today and is among GE's fastest growing business lines. GE is no stranger to capital-intensive industries that measure project lifespans in years or even decades, so Immelt emphasized that Cleantech is surely going to go through some ups and downs in terms of public and market sentiment. "Clean energy will have a long time horizon," he said. "This will be a $150 billion market by 2015 or 2020. And it's global."

Immelt acknowledged that "green" fatigue is a factor, especially since the public and policy makers have been inundated with hype around the promise of technology to fix the environment and energy problems. "Words matter. Brands matter," he said, emphasizing that the label "green" has lost its mojo. "The word 'green' has cheapened the clean energy movement. It makes it too precious for the common man. 'Energy security' would have been a better