the cloud services opportunity

8/3/2019 The Cloud Services Opportunity

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The Cloud ServicesOpportunity

By Jack Zubarev, President, Marketing & Alliances,Parallels

There can be no doubt that cloud computing has

arrived and will defne the IT landscape or at least

the next decade. According to IDC, spending on public

IT cloud oerings in 2014 will be almost one-third o

the net new growth in IT spending. And according to

a recent survey by Gartner, 10% o IT spending on

external services already comes rom cloud providers,

and roughly hal o the respondents indicated their budgets or cloud services are growing next year. The

uture demand or cloud services is all but ensured

by exponential growth o data volume (60%-70% per

year, according to recent data rom research frm

Telegeography3), together with an increasing appetite

or computing power to process that data.

This growth in demand has led to an increase in

the number and types o cloud services providers.

www.pipelinepub.comVolume 7, Issue 9

Even relatively simple, highly

available services rom the

Cloud have to be much more

fexible.
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Amazon is seeing signifcant competition emerge

rom the likes o Microsot, Rackspace, and Verizon.

In act, nearly all telecommunications providers, as

well as large value-added resellers and distributors,

have cloud services strategies under way. Additionally,

traditional sotware vendors are moving to cloud

delivery models or Sotware-as-a-Service (SaaS), led

by the likes o Salesorce.com and Intuit Quickbooks.

So how can current and uture providers o cloud

services best proft rom this industry-wide shit?

What are the key capabilities service providers need

rom their cloud service delivery platorm? What does

the coming o the cloud mean or traditional vertical

service delivery platorms? And how can providers

enhance the proftability o their cloud services

oerings?

The Unique Requirements of Delivering Cloud

Services

Traditional vertical service delivery platorms

are typically built to deliver one or a ew types o

service only, such as TV, phone, or Internet access.

Adding another service might require deployment

and integration o yet another service delivery

platorm, leading to long wait times rom inception to

implementation and complicating provisioning and

de-provisioningespecially when mixing and matching

platorms with dierent architectures, rom dierent

vendors.

Even relatively simple, highly available services rom

the cloud, such as shared Web hosting or business-

class e-mail, have to be much more exible to provide

the complete experience users now expect. When

users order Web hosting or example, they expect a

myriad o additional services such as DNS service,

Web access statistics, backup, and so orth, will be

included. A business-class e-mail service requires

anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving, and Web-access

unctionalityand the exibility and completeness

One o the promises o the

Cloud is universal access,

regardless o the underlying

platorm.
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o such service oerings oten determine their

proftability, as well as helping service providers to

dierentiate themselves rom the competition.

A complete cloud service delivery system that

satisfes users requirements and helps service

providers make money must be able to provision,

manage, and support thousandsor even tens o

thousandso dierent components.

Relationships Between Components

A cloud service delivery platorm must be able to

design relationships between the tens o thousands

o components involved in delivering cloud services in

order to create multiple options within service plans,

as well as critical dependencies, commercial terms,

and billing optionsincluding over-usage policies.

The complexity o the relationships possible between

components is signifcantly greater than what is

presently ound among traditional telecommunication

services.

One o the promises o the cloud is universal access.

End users expect to be able to use a desktop,

laptop, tablet, or mobile device to access the

services they need. The ability to provide service,

regardless o the underlying platorm, is critical or

end-user satisaction. Thereore, a complete cloud

service delivery platorm must be able to work with

a multitude o operating systems, databases, and

application servers that power provisioned services

and their individual components; be able to mix

and match them efciently to provide best-o-breed

service oerings; and be able to easily replace one

component with another i the need arises. (For

example, service providers must be able to easily

switch between third-party independent sotware

vendors who supply one o their enabled services.)

This complexity requires cloud service delivery

platorms to be able to handle the widest range o

diverse components.

Traditional vertical service delivery solutions are

typically designed to solely provision services locatedon a providers premises. However, many services

today are hosted on third-party vendors sites or in

the cloud. Consequently, a complete cloud service

delivery platorm must be able to provision, confgure,

and manage such remote or syndicated services

in conjunction with their on-premise services. For

example, a service provider may want to combine

an onsite Hosted Exchange deployment with osite

e-mail archiving rom a third party.

Because o increased complexity and the need to

Service providers need to

have a cloud service delivery

platorm o interdependent,

cross-platorm components.
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rapidly develop and roll out new services, traditional

vertical service delivery platorms will have a hard

time adapting to cloud requirements. But even i they

can deploy enough side-by-side vertical platorms to

be able to provision the ull spectrum o services, a

seamless user experience requires good integration

between services, which is extremely hard to achieve

with multiple vertical stacks not designed to work

together.

Self Service, Storefronts and Business Models

Cloud services require a higher degree o end-

user sel-service capabilities than traditional

telecommunication or IT services, and cloud service

delivery platorms need to take this need into

account. Sel service is an integral part o the overall

delivery systemespecially in view o the high volume

o new cloud services that are rapidly being made

available to end users.

The online storeront and underlying shopping cart

and product catalog or cloud services need to be

able to handle the tens o thousands o components

defned above. This makes such a storeront

and shopping cart much more complicated than

traditional interaces used by companies selling

widgets, as they need to be able to handle the

relationships and dependencies between all the

components. Much like sel service, this requirement

is another integral part o the overall cloud service

delivery platorm.

Traditional service delivery platorms have one

product catalog in the ordering system, another inthe provisioning system, and another in the billing

systemplus a stand-alone shopping cart application.

Because o the large number o components involved

in delivering cloud services, service providers either

need a mechanism or tight integration across

catalogs or, preerably, a single catalog across all

systems. Having multiple product catalogs has

always been difcult or telecommunication service

providers, who must maintain up to a dozen catalogs

in dierent systems. Without a well-designed cloud

service delivery platorm, cloud services will simply

take this mess to the next level.

Because o the scale o any reasonably sized cloud

service provider, the back end o its underlying

service delivery platorm has to be highly automated,eliminating the need or manual intervention in

processing, provisioning, and managing the cloud

services. Automation is needed not only to support

the need or an extremely high degree o sel service,

as described above, but also to maintain margins and

proftability. For example, a $10 per month service

simply cannot aord any manual operationsor even

a single support ticket.

The Way Forward

To succeed at delivering proftable public cloud services,

service providers need to have a complete Cloud

service delivery platorm, managing a large number ointerdependent cross-platorm components in perect order.

Traditional vertical service delivery platorms cannot manage

such complexity, nor do they typically have enough internal

integration points to provide a seamless experience to both

user and service provider.

Attempts to integrate multiple vertical platorms typically end

up as partially connected stacks o parallel unctionality. For

example, even i integrated systems can provision multiple

service components at once, de-provisioning usually must

be perormed manually in each system. While such an

approach might be acceptable or traditional services (e.g.,

voice and data services that people keep or extended

periods o time), cloud services are oten consumed

on-demand, and with the addition o each new service

component typically requiring reintegration o existing

systems, the resulting service levels would be unacceptable

in todays competitive marketplace. In short, a complete

cloud service delivery platorm must be purpose-built or the

cloud, with the goal o providing the ull set o services and

a seamless user experience or the entire service liecycle,

rom ordering to consuming to de-provisioning. Given the

innate complexity o cloud services, this is the only way to

ensure proftability.

About Parallels:

Parallels enables service providers to rapidly launch and efciently deliver the most proftable Cloud services by automating the delivery o the

broadest set o solutions demanded by small businesses. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a ast-growing company with 700 employees in NorthAmerica, Europe, and Asia. For more inormation, please visitwww.parallels.com/spp/eedback/.
http://www.parallels.com/spp/feedback/http://www.parallels.com/spp/feedback/http://www.parallels.com/spp/feedback/

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