“Should telcos rethink their Cloud strategies?” That is the question that Informa principal analyst Camille Mendler asks in an interview aired on TelecomTV on 5 August 2011 (referring to a recently published Informa report from their Telecom Cloud Monitor, see here).

The chart from the report summary shows that telecom players are aggressively claiming the cloud territory.

She goes on to talk about the danger of just duplicating what pure cloud players currently offer. Her concern is the risk of creating a situation comparable to early data and IP networks: When everyone was building the same thing, it became difficult for telcos to differentiate themselves in the face of imminent commoditisation.

To prevent going “from dumb pipe to dumb cloud” and getting caught again in pure price competition, Camille suggests that telcos differentiate their cloud portfolios: By concentrating on serving local or community requirements, for example, those of vertical industries, they can add real value to their cloud offers.

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Camille also asks “How can telcos really leverage their assets?” From a wholesale perspective, BT GTM believes this is one of the core differentiators for operators. Because they combine infrastructure, reliable transport, security and long-established relationships of trust with sensitive customer target groups, telcos and specialised communication providers can take a unique proposition to market. But they have to communicate that clearly to their audiences to be heard above the hype.

Working together and creating true interoperability between their networks, carriers can provide the unparalleled end-to-end experience in quality, reliability, security and transaction support required to build sustainable cloud business.

White-labelled services from wholesalers help communication providers to enhance their portfolios, to move away from simple computing and storage into cloud services that support the end-to-end business requirements of their vertical-market customers.

At BT Global Telecom Markets we work with our customers to develop sustainable cloud offers and enable their infrastructure to cope with the rising bandwidth demands driven by cloud adoption, especially in mobile networks. We aim to build customer dedicated solutions with an on-demand approach and high flexibility. We also help them achieve true inter-working across their interconnects to create the seamless experience their customers expect from the cloud – and to differentiate themselves further from pure-cloud vendors.

We are interested in your views of cloud for telcos and would be happy to provide further information about our approach. So please contact us.