To be sure, carrier readiness does depend on who you ask, and how long they've been gearing up for the cloud.
"We didn't have to do anything," says Wirt when asked how much work went into upgrading Tata's 42 data centers to offer its cloud services. "When I joined the company 15 months ago, we had a lot of new build, so there's no need for any of the locations where this will be implemented to do any retrofitting or improvement. In fact, the Singapore exchange that I'm sitting in now was purpose-built to be a cloud facility."
For telcos that haven't thought that far ahead, says Weinman of HP, they need to think about how to leverage their data center footprint well beyond the traditional internal back-office functions like billing and HR, to the point of looking at the network itself as an app.
"They need to consider transforming their network to become just another application sitting on a scalable IT infrastructure," he says. "For example, routing, WAN acceleration, hosted IP-PBXs, etc, are becoming just software. This will help them compete with new over-the-top entrants that aren't encumbered by legacy infrastructure."
In fact, Weinman adds, telcos need to be more flexible in thinking what constitutes a data center in the first place.
"It means thinking through how best to strategically leverage network assets and considering non-traditional locations as 'data centers', which might include switching centers or other network nodes, including last-mile distribution," he says. "These 'mini' data centers can support content delivery, multicasting and edge application delivery."
More challenges
Telcos face other challenges in prepping their data centers for cloud services, Weinman notes. These range from the usual challenges in building any complex environment and the IT competencies required (which in turn requires smart partner selection - see sidebar, "Outsourcing cloud build-out") to the ability to devise a tailored, appropriate strategy (as opposed to a "me too" strategy), as well as practical issues such as a systems management layer that can span different heterogeneous environments.