It is understandable that with its catchy, new, very marketable name, cloud computing may seem far removed from the evolutionary steps it has taken and that there is confusion over what the technology actually is and does — and doesn’t do. Whatever the definition, Joe Weinman, AT&T’s strategy guru for business services, says the cloud is a clear winner for carriers.
Weinman, strategy and business development vice president of AT&T Business Solutions, thinks the cloud is a perfect opportunity for operators to leverage their network assets, customer relationships and traditional services to create cloud services that are as compelling as they are differentiating.
Weinman will deliver a keynote address at the upcoming Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in Washington, D.C., June 9-11, where he will provide his perspective on the ways CSPs can leverage the industry fervor over the cloud. In this special for VON and xchange, B/OSS sat down to talk to Weinman about it ahead of the show.
B/OSS: How do you define cloud and what is your company’s strategy?
Joe Weinman: I have the Weinman definition of C.L.O.U.D. as an acronym: common, location-independent, online, utility on demand. The common attribute has to do with the statistical multiplexing of multiple customers or applications into a common resource pool, which is a clear generator of economic value across many different industries. I have done extensive analysis both through simulation and abstract math into the assorted value drivers of cloud and one of them is usage-sensitive, on-demand pricing. It turns out that whenever there is variable demand with the correct attribute of variability, cloud computing generates clear economic value.
With that definition in mind, it’s not just the typical resources like servers or storage, but many different kinds of services fall under that, and by that I mean hotel chains and rental cars and mortgage lenders all using the same model for accessing resources based on time, quantity and quality of those resources. Our strategy is to offer a variety of industry-standard cloud capabilities, such as our synaptic storage as a service, synaptic compute as a service, synaptic hosting, dozens of traditional SaaS packages like e-mail, messaging, financial and e-business capabilities, but also to expand the portfolio to things like unified communications and collaboration applications.
B/OSS: Have you proved the business case for either public or private cloud services? Is there one?
JW: We are heavy users of these technologies. We are both internal users as well as offering a wide variety of services externally. AT&T has been in this business for over 15 years. It started as shared Web hosting using the World Wide Web back in the early ‘90s then evolved into a variety of utility computing and storage offers where we did a number of services like gigabit-per-month coupled with very innovative utility on-demand offers. We offered pricing on average CPU utilization that evolved into what we think of today as cloud, a high degree of virtualization, coupled with usage-sensitive pricing and flexible on-demand resources. We are now at 38 Internet data centers globally. So this all represents an evolution of that early work.
As for talking about private cloud, that term has a bit of a checkered history as to whether there is such a thing as a private cloud. If it means virtualization, automation and standardization, then yes there is such a thing; it is called best practices for running data centers today.
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