As telcos strive to differentiate themselves and become cloud service providers, the need to differentiate themselves and provide stickiness is ever more apparent.
Rather than just storage and compute, which is becoming a commodity, it is flexibility and orchestration that is the differentiating factor.
Today, many service providers in Asia are exploring the waters and designing and commissioning state of the art designs that will shake up the market when the come online over the next six to nine months.
Paul Serrano, Riverbed’s Senior Director for Marketing APAC and Japan was recently in Bangkok launching Granite, Riverbed’s new storage over WAN acceleration solution. He explained how analysts have put the market for the public cloud at $100 billion by 2017. Of that, Software as a Service will be around $25 billion and of that $25 billion, his company is a significant player in providing the infrastructure to make it happen.
Today service providers such as SingTel, Pacnet, AT&T, Verizon and many others provide their managed services through Riverbed equipment. In all 35% to 40% of Riverbed’s revenue comes from service providers in the region.
Riverbed has three plays for the service provider to consider.
First is its partnership with Akamai in which it will provide acceleration for three of the most popular cloud apps - Google Apps, Salesforce and Office 365. Using the Akamai network alone, even without acceleration, typical ping times go down from 85 ms to 25 ms just based on more efficient routing. Adding acceleration makes the apps feel even faster. Acceleration for other services will be considered on an opportunistic basis.
Second is orchestration. Service providers can offer services so that extra compute resources can be automatically fired up when needed but in a way that is not locked in to Amazon AWS or VMWare ESXi.
Third is Riverbed’s traditional wide area network storage optimisation, providing storage at the speed of local while actually being accessed over a WAN. Serrano said that one regional telco that cannot be named has just signed onto Virtual Steelhead WAN optimisation to provide as a service.
Of course, while these are offered as services to cloud service providers here, they are also offered for those looking to host their apps in Amazon or Rackspace too.
While many organisations are still weary of the public cloud, they are looking at IT consolidation and IT consolidation is just another word for private cloud, he said. As they do so, more and more organisations are now looking at offloading non-critical apps to the public cloud.
The public cloud is so compelling from an economic standpoint that it will happen fast. It has already happened in the US and Europe and Asia is last.
Asia has more SMEs than large corporates. The question is how can SMEs afford the latest NetApp or EMC storage array? The answer is that by using storage services from SingTel they can get an EMC or NetApp frame on a pay as you go basis without any capital outlay.
Roberto Galbiati, SEA Sales Director at Riverbed, said that he is working with many regional service providers to help them build the infrastructure. The biggest problem he is seeing is that the service providers simply do not know what they need.
He explained that the telcos realise they cannot rely on the commodity of bandwidth and they are now looking at additional services. They are issuing RFPs, RFIs and RFQs for the design of many different cloud environments.
“It is a play that you will see in six to nine months when these come online and users start attaching themselves to these services,” he said.