Verizon's Shammo: SMB cloud is a great opportunity for growth

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) executive vice president and CFO Fran Shammo told investors he recognizes that while cloud services represent a large growth opportunity for them, they need to find a way to differentiate its offering amidst what has become a crowded space.

Fran Shamm0, Verizon

Shammo (Image source: Verizon)

"In the cloud space right now there's a ton of choice and there's a ton of price ranges within that choice, and I think we have a lot more work to do really compete across that footprint if you will," Shammo said today at the Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference.

Verizon has been primarily focused on serving the large enterprise space.

Shammo said the key is crafting solutions that take into consideration the unique nature of each of their customer's business needs.

"The trick is can we create something that really gets us across the map as you choose what you want. Do you want security, do you want flexibility to add services?" he said. "What you'll have to see in the ecosystem here is we'll have to get to a flexible model to deal with the wider range of customers we have, but we're not there yet."

In particular, Shammo added that the next opportunity lies in the small to medium sized business (SMB) space that has been traditionally served by web-centric providers like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).

"We play well in the enterprise and government grade part of the cloud space, but we have not tapped into the small to medium sized business yet, and I think that's our opportunity for growth," he said.

Since purchasing Terremark in 2011, Verizon has been aggressively building out its data center infrastructure in both the United States and in key international regions such as Europe and Latin America.

While Verizon's overall business service revenues declined 2.6 percent year-over-year to $3.8 billion in Q1 2013 due to expected declines in legacy voice and data service transport, sales global strategic enterprise services such as cloud, managed services, and Ethernet grew 6 percent.

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