Why Telcos need to think like their customers when it comes to providing SaaS

infrastructureDavid Strom

Telco Cloud 10/14

Agenda

My backgroundJourney to the customer4 key infrastructure choices4 key metricsHow two enterprises moved into the cloudTakeaways and lessons learned

My background• Analyst at Gigaom Research• Former Editor-in-Chief at

Network Computing, Tom’s Hardware.com

• Toiled in end-user computing back in the mid 1980s

• Written two computer technology books

Journey to the customer

The evolution of the cloud

On-premises apps running on their company-owned physical servers

Virtualize these servers to in-house hypervisorsMove apps to the public cloudBuild hybrid cloudsUse co-lo or managed services facilities

4 key infrastructure choices

Can your current internal apps be converted into something with a Web front end?

Can your business logic be hosted elsewhere and be made more scalable?

Can you provide security as a service layer for your apps? Can you virtualize each of your servers without losing

performance, security and reliability?

4 key metrics

What is your response time for issue resolution and other internal support needs?

Can you calculate your app-level return on investment? What is your end-to-end app latency? What is the frequency of overall infrastructure outages?

Case study: Engagency.com

Case study: CrazyForEducation.com

Takeaways

It is all about speed of app deliveryThe rate of evolution varies tremendously for each business, and for

departments within each businessThere is no single monolithic appThere is also no single cloud situation Mobile devices have become the defacto computing endpoint IT staffs will have to evolve and become more collaborative Everything becomes browser-based, even mainframe apps Availability and disaster recovery needs to be baked into everythingSelf-service portals are critical