Innovating at the Edge in the Age of the Cloud

With the rise of Software as a Service and Social Media network service providers are witnessing a game changing shift in how consumer and business services and applications are delivered. Some service providers see the opportunity to break beyond their connection oriented business model and embrace these new cloud-based services. In order to do so they are looking for ways to adapt their networks to accommodate these new services.

Service Delivery on the Edge
In order to take advantage of the new business models brought about by the service transformation network service providers need to consider a number of factors, including adopting progressive business and monetization strategies and considering subscribers’ preferences in the service definition process. For the network service provider the most critical change is to leverage the underlying network architecture to support the new service offerings. As a result the traditional architecture of service provider edge networks is undergoing an aggressive period of evolution and shifting focus from simply a point of network connectivity to becoming a vital services creation and innovation point.

Subscriber Defined Services
Matching services and applications to customer expectations has always been a formidable challenge for telecom operators. However, it is now even more difficult given that the expectations of a telecom subscriber have changed drastically over the past few years. In the past consumer and business subscribers were tethered to the network services provider as their sole source of services, but today these subscribers have connections to OTT providers and access a variety of personal and business applications. An Important change is that these subscribers are not just service consumers, but they are also shaping service innovations by leveraging more intelligent and programmable platforms and devices.

The Critical Role of the Network in Supporting Cloud-Based Solutions

Cloud Services
The Cloud-based service model offers the Enterprise access to a rich range of services and applications without the overhead of having to deploy and manage the underlying infrastructure. This results in much lower costs for access to services and applications. This is especially true for one time or periodic workloads where resources may sit idle for months until required. As a result Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud services and benefiting from on-demand availability.

Delivery Models
Demand for cloud services is being met in a number of ways. Independent software vendors offer services from their data center over the Internet, such as Salesforce.com’s CRM application. Some ISVs leverage an IaaS provider such as Amazon to host their application on the Internet such as Adobe’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. However, since these approaches rely on the Internet it is not possible to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS), so neither approach supports providing an SLA for network performance. This is increasingly a concern for Enterprise customers.

The Need for SLA's
The need for SLA’s for cloud services opens up an opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs) to offer a wide range of network centric solutions that are supported by an SLA. CSPs are in a unique position to offer these solutions because, unlike the Internet, the Next Generation Networks (NGNs) that CSPs have deployed, based on IP and MPLS, are capable of providing contracted levels of availability, delay, jitter and packet loss. As a result CSPs can provide cloud-based solutions with SLAs by providing these solutions to customers from their own data center and over their NGN.