Operators Should Have Their Heads in the Clouds

AT&T’s Strategy Guru for Business Services Says the Cloud Is a Clear Winner for Carriers

It is understandable that with its catchy, new, very marketable name, cloud computing may seem far removed from the evolutionary steps it has taken. There is still confusion over what the technology actually is and does — and doesn’t do. Whatever the definition, Joe Weinman, AT&T’s strategy guru for business services, says the cloud is a clear winner for carriers.

Weinman, strategy and business development vice president of AT&T Business Solutions, thinks the cloud is a perfect opportunity for operators to leverage their network assets, customer relationships and traditional services to create cloud services that are as compelling as they are differentiating.

Weinman, who delivers a closing keynote address at the B/OSS Conference & Expo Friday, will provide his perspective on the ways CSPs can leverage the industry fervor over the cloud. B/OSS sat down to talk to Weinman about it ahead of the show.

B/OSS: How do you define cloud and what is your company’s strategy?

Joe Weinman: I have the Weinman definition of C.L.O.U.D. as an acronym: common, location-independent, online, utility on demand. The common attribute has to do with the statistical multiplexing of multiple customers or applications into a common resource pool, which is a clear generator of economic value across many different industries. I have done extensive analysis both through simulation and abstract math into the assorted value drivers of cloud and one of them is usage-sensitive, on-demand pricing. It turns out that whenever there is variable demand with the correct attribute of variability, cloud computing generates clear economic value.

With that definition in mind, it’s not just the typical resources like servers or storage, but many different kinds of services fall under that, and by that I mean hotel chains and rental cars and mortgage lenders all using the same model for accessing resources based on time, quantity and quality of those resources. Our strategy is to offer a variety of industry-standard cloud capabilities, such as our synaptic storage as a service, synaptic compute as a service, synaptic hosting, dozens of traditional SaaS packages like e-mail, messaging, financial and e-business capabilities, but also to expand the portfolio to things like unified communications and collaboration applications.

B/OSS: In marketing cloud services, should the term cloud be kept out of it like DSL should have been?

JW: Consumers don’t really care if something is a cloud service. They just want the benefits and functionality. I would claim POTS, VoIP and even IPTV are all cloud services the way I described them, but all they know is that they are getting the service. For SMB users, there is probably a mix of buyers out there, some of whom are very technologically sophisticated and understand the cloud and what it can do. So regardless of what it is called and how it is marketed, there are compelling advantages that cloud capabilities offer.

B/OSS: Have you proved the business case for either public or private cloud services? Is there one?

JW: We are heavy users of these technologies. We are both internal users as well as offering a wide variety of services externally. AT&T has been in this business for over 15 years. It started as shared Web hosting using the World Wide Web back in the early ‘90s then evolved into a variety of utility computing and storage offers where we did a number of services like gigabit-per-month coupled with very innovative utility on-demand offers. We offered pricing on average CPU utilization that evolved into what we think of today as cloud, a high degree of virtualization, coupled with usage-sensitive pricing and flexible on-demand resources. We are now at 38 Internet data centers globally. So this all represents an evolution of that early work.

As for talking about private cloud, that term has a bit of a checkered history as to whether there is such a thing as a private cloud. If it means virtualization, automation and standardization, then yes there is such a thing; it is called best practices for running data centers today.

B/OSS: What will your talk at B/OSS World be about?

JW: Telecom providers have a very strong play by being able to tie together their hosting/utility/cloud business with their network access and transport business to provide end-to-end services that help meet the business needs of SMB and enterprise customers. A big part of that will be on-demand resource allocation coupled with billing.

A few years ago, I predicted that the network computing utility business would go toward more dynamic and non-unified pricing, in other words pricing that would better reflect cost or value and might vary based on time-of-day or using yield management and dynamic pricing. If you get a hotel room overlooking Central Park, you would probably pay more per square foot than in other areas. It would be the same for telecom providers.

As we move to this broad set of highly automated solutions, billing and OSS systems will sooner or later have to reflect that inherent systemic complexity coupled with a high degree of variability. Managing all that dynamism presents a challenge and an opportunity for the billing and OSS vendors.

Joe Weinman leads global portfolio strategy and business development for AT&T Business Solutions. A 29-year veteran of AT&T, Weinman is a prolific inventor, author and has held a variety of executive positions of increasing responsibility, spanning research and development at AT&T Bell Laboratories, marketing, sales, product management, engineering and operations, and corporate strategy and business development.

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