Why Telcos need to think like their
customers when it comes to
providing SaaS infrastructure
David Strom
Telco Cloud 10/14

Agenda
My background
Journey to the customer
4 key infrastructure choices
4 key metrics
How two enterprises moved into the cloud
Takeaways and lessons learned

My background
• Analyst at Gigaom Research
• Former Editor-in-Chief at
Network Computing, Tom’s
Hardware.com
• Toiled in end-user computing
back in the mid 1980s
• Written two computer technology
books

Journey to the customer

The evolution of the cloud
On-premises apps running on their company-owned physical servers
Virtualize these servers to in-house hypervisors
Move apps to the public cloud
Build hybrid clouds
Use co-lo or managed services facilities

4 key infrastructure choices
Can your current internal apps be converted into something with a Web
front end?
Can your business logic be hosted elsewhere and be made more
scalable?
Can you provide security as a service layer for your apps?
Can you virtualize each of your servers without losing performance,
security and reliability?

4 key metrics
What is your response time for issue resolution and other internal
support needs?
Can you calculate your app-level return on investment?
What is your end-to-end app latency?
What is the frequency of overall infrastructure outages?

Case study: Engagency.com

Case study: CrazyForEducation.com

Takeaways
It is all about speed of app delivery
The rate of evolution varies tremendously for each business, and for departments
within each business
There is no single monolithic app
There is also no single cloud situation
Mobile devices have become the defacto computing endpoint
IT staffs will have to evolve and become more collaborative
Everything becomes browser-based, even mainframe apps
Availability and disaster recovery needs to be baked into everything
Self-service portals are critical