cloud – TelcoTalk

06/12/2019

Smarter homes and Smarter Telcos, what’s the link?

Originally posted on 29Jun10 to IBM Developerworks (10,979 Views)

I was looking at where some of the traffic for this blog comes from this morning. Someone had used Google to search for “ibm sdp cloud” which I am glad to say yielded this blog as the third and forth results. Above Telco Talk in the results was a post from 2005 from fellow MyDeveloperworks blogger Bobby Woolf with his post What is in RAD 6.0 – which is interesting in that the post wasn’t about Service Delivery Platforms and the term “SDP” is only mentioned in the comments on the post, yet it rated higher in Google’s index than my posts which have been about cloud, SDPs or both! That’s another conversation though…

The thing that really caught my attention was a new whitepaper form IBM on Smarter Homes. This has been an ongoing area of interest for me for a few years now. This new whitepaper “The IBM vision of a smarter home enabled by cloud technology” is interesting – it talks about some of the concepts that I have seen coming over the past few years, but it also introduces the concept of Cloud based services providers as the key enabler outside the home to enable smarter home to deliver on their lofty promises. In the introduction of the whitepaper, it states:

A common services delivery platform based on industry standards supports cooperative interconnection and creation of new services. Implementation inside the cloud delivers quick development of services at lower cost, with shorter time to market, facilitating rapid experimentation and improvement. The emergence of cloud computing, Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), together with new standards, is the key that will open up the field for the new smarter home services.
Excerpt from “The IBM vision of a smarter home enabled by cloud technology”

https://www.telstra.com.au/aboutus/media/media-releases/telstra-launches-t-hub-2—the-smarter-phone-for-australian-homes

The dependence on external networks (from our homes) and external Communications Service Providers presents an opportunity for them to provide much more than just the pipe to the house. This is an area that some Telcos are trying to tap into already. Here in Australia, Telstra have recently introduced a home based smart device called the T-Hub which is intended to arrest some of the decline in homes installing or keeping land line phones (in Australia, more and more homes are buying a naked DSL or Hybrid Fibre Coax (HCF) service for Internet and using mobile phones for voice calls and not having a home phone service at all). I recently cancelled my Telstra Home Phone service, so I cannot buy one of the T-Hubs and apparently it won’t work with my home phone service via my HCF connection. It is an intriguing idea though. I find myself wondering if Telstra’s toe in the Smarter Home pond is too little too late. For years, in Telstra’s Innovation Centres (one in Melbourne and one in Sydney) they had standing demonstrations of smarter home technology (I think the previous Telstra CEO, Sol Tujilllo closed them down). I even helped to install a Smarter Healthcare demo at the Sydney Telstra Innovation Centre a few years ago (more on that later) and their demos were every bit as good as the demos that IBM has at the Austin (Texas, USA) and LaGaude (France) Telecom Solutions Labs.

Further into the whitepaper, when talking about Cloud based Service Delivery Platforms (pp 10) there is a nice summary of why a Telco would consider a cloud deployment of their SDP:

An SDP in the cloud supports the expansion of the services scope by enabling new services in existing markets and by expanding existing services into new markets with minimum risk. By exposing standard service interfaces in the network, it enables third parties to integrate their services quickly, or to build new services based on the service components provided in the SDP. This creates the opportunity for new business models, for instance, for media distribution and advertising throughout multiple delivery scenarios.

I think this illustrates what all Telcos should be thinking about – the agility needed to compete in today’s marketplace. Cloud is one way to enhance that agility but also adds elasticity – the ability to grow and shrink as the market demands grow and shrink. Sorry for rambling a bit there… some semi-random thoughts kept popping up when talking about Smarter homes and Telcos. Anyway, I would encourage you to have a read of the whitepaper for yourself. It’s available via slideshare:

IBM Smart Home Vision Using Cloud Technology from IBMElectronics

Disclaimer: I own a small number of shares in Telstra Corp.

28/11/201905/12/2019

Impact 2010 – BPM in the Cloud

Originally posted on 05May10 to IBM Developerworks (10,946 Views)

I have just seen Amy Wohl of Amy D Wohl Opinions present on Cloud computing, she was going through the various cloud models and spoke about Community Clouds. What she means by that is multiple community focused clouds as part of a larger (private) cloud. An example of that is the Vietnam Government that bought an IBM Cloudburst to provide multiple virtual private clouds to small businesses in Vietnam so that they can have access to computing power that they otherwise now be able to afford. For Telcos, this could be an offering to their local community groups – perhaps a local schools, bar, sporting clubs, service clubs etc but also potentially for commercial organisations – perhaps to small businesses.

She also made the interesting point that (in her opinion) we are too early in the cloud evolution to actually define standards. She believes that any standards set now would stifle innovation in cloud technology and interoperability. I was interested to hear about this since I attended a web conference call a few weeks ago run by the TeleManagement Forum’s effort to create standards around clouds, particularly For Enterprise use rather than public clouds. I guess the Enterprise cloud market is the most likely type of cloud user that will need interoperability first, thus the emphasis on standards.

Amy co-presented with John Falkl from IBM who discussed BPM within the cloud. Given BPM is a business function, items subjects such as Security are usually one of the biggest hurdles for Cloud Services. There are multiple factors that fall under the title of ‘security’ such as encryption, roles, authentication (especially when using federates or external authentication services), legal data protection requirements and authorisations. John also pointed out a number of considerations that should be considered in enterprise cloud services including Governance models (which he sees as an extension to normal enterprise governance models). John’s view of standards for Cloud services is that it will most likely start with Web Services standards such as WS-Provisioning and mentioned that there were multiple efforts around cloud standards. I might see if I can have a chat to both John and Amy after the session to get their views on the TMF’s efforts around cloud standards. If that discussion is interesting, I will report back.

Amy made a really interesting point during the Q&A – she said that when she was at Microsoft a few weeks ago and asked about transactional activity in their cloud – they said that MS could not do it…. Very interesting especially when you consider that transactional integrity is a core capability on IBM’s cloud capability.

<edit>
I asked Amy about the TMF Cloud standardisation – she hadn’t heard about it, but did say that she thought that TMF’s approach was right – asking the enterprise customers to specify their requirements – she also thought they were probably the right place to start for any cloud standards too.
</edit>