SCIENCE

IBM has announced a new cloud services platform to help communications service providers capitalize on the growing market opportunity for public cloud services expected to increase to $89 billion by 2015.

This announcement is about helping communications service providers bring their customers new services. Service providers can now quickly and cost-effectively enable hundreds or even thousands of new services and use an integrated cloud service management platform to create, deliver and manage those services.

The IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform is a comprehensive set of hardware, software and services to help providers rapidly deliver cloud computing on their own. It includes the most advanced, carrier-grade technology with all the essential security and service management capabilities to ensure reliability essential to their own customers.

It allows Communications Service Providers to rapidly transform their business to deliver new services over their existing networks and drive new sources of revenue. They can use it to deliver  "as-a-service" offerings such as collaboration applications, customer relationship management services, data storage, back up and recovery, and industry-specific applications.

This new cloud service management solution, built on the IBM Service Delivery Manager platform for cloud computing, can help providers speed the time to market of new services while lowering associated cost and business risk, allowing service providers to:

• Accelerate the launch of new partner services from six months to six weeks
• Provision tens of thousands of virtual machines per hour
• Launch partner applications and services such as unified communications, collaboration, field force management, sales tracking and customer relationship management applications
• Provide developers a secure development and test cloud to create innovative new applications
• Offer infrastructure services to employees, partners and customers such as secure storage and virtual access to desktop applications
• Provision new services in less than a minute
• Scale to run and manage millions of concurrently running virtual machines

Cloud-based services are emerging as an important new business model for the communications industry. However, providers need to quickly define their strategy if they want to capitalize on this new and fast-growing opportunity.

"IBM is using its cloud expertise to help the world's service providers capture new market opportunities and expand the value of their networks in new ways," said Scott Stainken, general manager, IBM global telecommunications industry. "IBM is the only one to offer proven, carrier-grade reliability and the only one of its kind that can deliver scalable and secure cloud computing over heterogeneous networks. Today's news goes beyond just providing the infrastructure, we're also bringing together partners and expertise to help providers grow cloud services into a profitable new business."  Multiple pilots worldwide are already underway on the IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform with clients such as Orange, Shanghai Telecom and SK Telecom.  

Orange, a major global telecommunications company, is using the IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform in a pilot project to create new infrastructure-as-a-service offerings for their customers. "IBM is providing a fully integrated stack delivering highly secured virtualized infrastructure that can be used to provide our internal and external customers a new level of infrastructure-as-a-service. For example, automating the extension of our customers' data-center and providing highly customized topologies," said Didier Jaubert, senior vice president Global Services of Orange Business Services. "This integrated platform provided by IBM is an important step for us to expand our capabilities faster and beyond those of other carriers."

Providers that adopt the IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform will receive new support and benefits to help them access the IBM partner ecosystem to extend, market, enable and sell their cloud services. These new benefits are available immediately and will be formally rolled out early next year as part of a broader new cloud partner program.

Companies such as Broadsoft, Corent Technology, deCarta, Jamcracker, Juniper Networks, NetApp, Openet, RightScale and Wavemaker are supporting the platform today and are joined by a range of cloud builders, application, technology and infrastructure providers, as well as resellers, and cloud aggregators. IBM's Venture Capital Group worked with six of these nine partners during their startup phase, helping them to become IBM Business Partners and make their technologies enterprise-ready using IBM hardware and software. This ecosystem can be accessed through a global network of 38 IBM Innovation Centers with dedicated technology, marketing and sales resources to help integrate partner applications and vendor technologies. Other vendors leave this complex work to the customer.

"Shanghai Telecom is piloting IBM's new platform to extend computing and telecommunications into the enterprise market to capture the growing business opportunity to provide infrastructure to businesses and multinational corporations operating in China," said Chen Xiao Qin, vice director, marketing, Shanghai Telecom. "We're making an important shift in the way we do business by providing clients powerful cloud computing services as well as cost savings."

At the core of the carrier-grade cloud offering is IBM Service Delivery Manager. The advanced software quickly deploys applications— automating the deployment, monitoring and management of cloud computing services for IT staff. Additionally, the Tivoli Netcool network and service assurance portfolio and other IBM software provide integrated service management, network monitoring, built-in security, storage virtualization, service level agreement management and usage and accounting management.

IBM also offers services to support a cloud-based model such as business strategy consulting, sales training and education, business intelligence and analytics and services, application development and testing, and integration services.

"Cloud Services enable new opportunities that leverage our convergence and connectivity strategies and investment in networks and systems," said Ibrahim J Gedeon, chief technology officer, TELUS Communications of Canada. "Any device-anyone-everywhere is where cloud meets revenue."

IBM works with the top 1,000 communications service providers worldwide, including all 20 of the largest global providers. The IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform is currently available worldwide from IBM.