In mid April, the Communications Technology Consultants Association (CTCA) put most of this country’s telecom companies on the hot seat. They invited executives from TELUS, Bell Canada, Rogers Communications, MTS Allstream and Cogeco Data Services to sit on a panel at their annual conference in Kitchener, Ontario. I was honoured to be the TELUS representative.

The subject of our discussion was cloud computing and everything it makes possible – from applications like messaging, collaboration and videoconferencing to true “work anywhere, anytime” capabilities. And the biggest question was the one that came first. Roberta Fox, President and Senior Partner of Fox Group Consulting, told us that her clients still want reassurances that we’re serious about the cloud. Before they put “their hearts and souls into it”, she told us, they want to know that the telecom companies are going to stick with it for the next 8 to 10 years.

Another consultant agreed with her, worrying that as cloud services cut into our legacy products and services, we may start cutting back on the cloud. In other words, are we just dipping our toes in to test the waters, or are we really committed.

I told the panel that as far as TELUS is concerned, we've moved beyond legacy services to offer robust innovative cloud services that leverage our IP networks. My peers agreed. There was a consensus that if we don't offer cloud services, we'll lose clients to others who will – and the cloud is the best way to offer new solutions in place of our legacy services.

One of my peers pointed out that you can't offer the cloud unless you have a network. To me, you need both a reliable network and IT infrastructure for the client to really leverage the cloud. The great news is service providers have extensive knowledge and expertise in offering reliable network based services. In fact, here at TELUS we've been demonstrating an ability to offer cloud-like services for over 100 years. When you think about it, the voice services we all grew up with use a cloud-like structure, with the main applications residing on the network and the clients – the phone sets – accessing them. Then there are services like managed hosting, where we take over the management and monitoring of a client’s servers and they can access their data and applications from anywhere.

As I see it, the real challenge is to make sure that the networks we build for cloud services are as secure, reliable, efficient and scalable as possible. A client has to know that when they connect to the network, it will work, in just the same way you expect dial tone when you pick up the phone. That means end-to-end reliability, from layer 1 right to the application.

Sure, it’s easy to say, but it’s not that easy to do. If your service provider doesn’t get the fundamentals right, nothing will be right. It’s critical to ensure the network continues to offer unmatched reliability and uptime. But you’re probably more interested in the kind of services the cloud makes possible.

At TELUS, we think the big ones are:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where we provide  computing infrastructure over the network, and manage the computing in our data centres – for example:
  • Managed hosting, where we monitor and manage the client’s servers and/or applications in our data centre
    
• Software as a Service (SaaS), where the application resides on the network, rather than on individual computers or tablets – for example:
  • Collaboration, with services like video conferencing, file sharing and more, making it possible for people to work together no matter where they are
    
• Platform as a Service (PaaS), where we provide the networks, server and storage and our clients use our tools and libraries to create their own applications and deploy them
  

Put all these together, and you’re going to be able to do just about anything on the cloud, even in remote areas.

Interestingly, we’ve found that as we open up our network to the developer community, they’re taking advantage of the opportunity to innovate. We’re seeing all kinds of new applications and we’re noticing how consumer-type services are being adopted and adapted for business use. For example, business social media is breaking down silos between us and our clients and suppliers, and between our clients and their stakeholders.

We also believe that we need to use cloud based collaboration tools like enterprise social media ourselves. Using the cloud in this way demonstrates the value to our clients and allows us to attract the quality workforce we need as they expect to have access to these tools.

So no, this cloud isn’t blowing away, it’s here to stay.  All I can say is the forecast looks terrific.

Lloyd Switzer

SVP-Network Transformation

TELUS