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An increasingly cloudy outlook

Doug Mohney — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:54:37 -0500

You're going to hear a lot more about cloud computing, but the marketing people seem to be determined to - ahem - fog up what cloud computing is and what it means for businesses large and small. More importantly, cloud computing is going to have an impact upon a wide range of telecom-businesses over the next five years.

Part of the problem is that cloud computing has some of its marketing muddling roots in the original concept of grid computing. Grid computing realizes that a lot of computers large and small have idle cycles, so if you have a bunch of desktop and servers sitting around late at night doing nothing more than warming the building, you can use software to harness all that excess compute power to work on big complex problems, like looking for new drug combinations, searching for ET or cracking codes. Very high geek, very boring stuff.

Meanwhile, we had the Internet - the "grid" writ large. Folks like Amazon are building large server farms for ecommerce and getting them powered up in the six weeks leading to December 25, which will be followed by a significant drop-off in capacity needed. In engineering diagrams, the Internet is a big "cloud" and you don't know - or want to know - what's behind the curtain. Instead, you just want the services to work when you need them.

Amazon (and to be fair, others) figured out if you had to build web services to scale up and down, you might as well do it in a relatively generic fashion, so you can put whatever you need up and have the ability to scale capacity to peaks and demands.

Tada! Cloud computing!

Put more simply in <ahem> my definition, cloud computing provides a platform/service for hosted applications that can easily scale up or down. Hosting on steroids, basically. Annnd, you're able to sell the services to others. If you're operating a solution in-house, it's grid computing in my book, but you'll likely call it cloud computing because you want to use the latest buzz words.

Why is this important for telecom? Three reasons:

1) Big companies running hosted services now will likely offer cloud computing services in the future. They already have the data centers and the infrastructure, all they need to do is to start off with a row full of racks and "scale" upward. They can squeeze more money out of existing hardware and infrastructure while (potentially) being able to drop prices for more attractive SMBs.

Expect AT&T and Verizon to offer cloud computing services. Maybe IBM and other services establishments.

2) Companies running hosted applications (i.e. they rent servers in a machine room from the guys in 1) and throw their apps on top) will want to look at cloud computing services if they have peaks and valleys in the demand for their applications; in other words, either seasonal events (Christmas) or major activities (elections, Super Bowl, Final 4) that result in heavy demand for their services - but not all the time. Companies currently running stock applications with a fairly predicable and steady rate of growth will stick with what they know.

Color your typical CDN as looking at cloud computing

3) Start-up companies and other new ventures will tend to drift to cloud computing, because it allows them to buy what resources they need when they need it, rather than having to plunk down either large capital expenditures to build their own servers or buy a hosted-server-at-a-time step function without a way to scale up and down more easily.

We're starting to see telecom apps appear on clouds already. Sylantro has its apps running on Amazon's Web services and Microsoft's Tellme division operates its own in-house cloud. Hosted UC and call center service will most likely have a cloud engine driving them.

It's not going to happen overnight, but the clouds are coming.

- Doug

Microsoft's Azure cloud drifts in

Doug Mohney — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:37:13 -0400

At its Professional Developer's Conference on Monday, Microsoft announced Windows Azure, its new cloud computing platform and services. The offerings will have an impact upon a number of markets, including hosted telephony services and online video distribution.

At its heart, Microsoft's Azure is a service running on a "vast number" of machines residing in Microsoft's own data centers. Over the past year, Microsoft has opened up data centers in Quincy,Wash., and San Antonio and is scheduled to open up two more centers in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland. The company said it was putting 10,000 new servers on line every month, with new data centers costing $500,000 each.

By using Microsoft tools, the company claims Azure will make it easier and cheaper for companies to write their own web apps that can rapidly scale to meet demand. Developers will be able to code apps using existing .NET tools and services and test them on a local PC before a general release; a demonstration easily scaled up the number of computing servers available to the app simply by changing a line of XML code.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model Microsoft is slowly rolling out with Azure is likely to make phone and hosting companies a wee bit uncomfortable. It allows Microsoft to offer its own hosted applications, be they simple web services or IP telephony and UC offerings, without having to work with a hosting middleman.

However, Microsoft isn't alone in the clouds. Amazon.com is aggressively marketing its EC2 service, including a CDN service; Sylantro also has a deal with Amazon to deliver its IP telephony offerings on Amazon servers. It is only a matter of time before the larger phone companies of the world decide that yes, they too, can offer some cloud.

For more:
- PC Pro coverage of Windows Azure cloud announcement.
- eWeek details Windows Azure services.

Amazon enters CDN market fray

Dan O'Shea — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:46:57 -0400

Internet retailer Amazon's new content delivery network offering that may not strike fear into the hearts of CDN market leaders and their biggest competitors, but may introduce a new wrinkle to the market in the form of a low-priced service with basic CDN features.

Akamai Technologies, LimeLight Networks and an increasing number of large carriers, such as Level 3 Communications, have gone to war in the CDN space, though their offerings might be described as feature-rich, with live broadcast support, monitoring and reporting capabilities, authentication for video and other attributes. In a story at Telephony, Dan Rayburn, executive vice president of StreamingMedia.com, a publication covering online video technology, says Amazon's service won't have those features, and probably will not appeal to most of the big content customers that Akamai and the telcos are chasing.

Still, as the CDN market gets more competitive, you would think that crafting different types of CDN packages for less sophisticated customer needs will become much more important for everyone involved in the market.

For more:
- see this story at Telephony