Cloud is a broad term, referring primarily to data-center-hosted services that are accessed remotely over an Internet infrastructure. Until recently, these services have been data-centric, but with the evolution of VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), voice and unified communications have become part of the cloud phenomenon.
Cloud communications are voice and data communications services where telecommunications applications, switching and storage are hosted by a third-party. For enterprises, they are typically accessed over a secure, wide area network (e.g. MPLS).
The success of Google and others as cloud-based providers has demonstrated that a cloud-based platform can be just as effective as an on-premise software-based platform, but at a much lower cost.
In the past, businesses have been able to do this for IT services, but not telecom. There are three trends pushing companies to the cloud for enterprise communications:
- The first trend is increasingly distributed company operations in branches and home offices, making WANs cumbersome, inefficient and costly without the introduction of a session management layer and central dial plan
- Second, more collaboration applications are now available and more communications devices (smart phones, tablets, etc.), all needing access to the enterprise network.
- Third, data centers housing enterprise IT assets and applications are now virtualized which lowers costs and are often being located and managed remotely, but requires scale to be effective
The cloud market is a sizable growth opportunity that service providers (SPs) shouldn't ignore. Gartner forecasts the global addressable public cloud market for applications (SaaS) and computing (IaaS and the various flavors of PaaS) to exceed $40 billion annually by 2015. Value-added cloud-enablement services will potentially add another $20 billion. SPs have a clear advantage in the Cloud Communications space.
