Enabling SP Business Models for Cloud Services
Perhaps you’re wondering where the demand for cloud services will come from, what will be the key market drivers, and how will service provider business models fit into the expanding view of the overall IT infrastructure virtualization market landscape.
A prime indicator of the upcoming groundswell came from attendees at a recent IT tradeshow. Despite the reported benefits of virtualization, a majority of IT managers polled at Interop say they experience problems with the technology and don’t always realize the anticipated cost benefit.
A Market Primed for Cloud Services
More than one-fourth of those polled at Interop cited a lack of training on virtual infrastructure and 21% expressed concern over an inability to secure the infrastructure. For nearly 60%, the primary problem with virtualization was a lack of experience to appropriately manage the technology and nearly 50% said that technology implementation costs were too high.
In contrast, securely interconnecting data center assets extends the benefits of service provider resource pools. SP costs decrease as resources are shared more efficiently and amortized across different cloud service offerings. Those inherent savings can then be passed on to your end customers - along with your proven technical guidance and support capabilities that customers truly crave.
“As service providers take proactive steps at transitioning to cloud services and becoming part of the value chain of data center virtualization, they are looking at two key factors, profitability and increasing revenue,” said Ray Mota, chief strategist for Synergy Research Group. “The Cisco Unified Service Delivery solution is designed to increase speed to new revenue, simplify service delivery, provide a more secure experience and reduce costs while addressing data center longevity and efficiencies.”
Advantages of Secure Cloud Service Delivery
Now multi-service data centers can use the power of network virtualization and be combined with the power of an application- and subscriber-aware IP NGN helping service providers offer personalized, on-demand features and an end-to-end secure virtual experience. Cisco’s Nexus NX-OS and CRS-1 IOS XR together deliver a highly secure physical and logical service separation from the data center production to the customer.
Clearly, IT managed service providers are eager to step forward, share their experience and meet the evolving cloud service needs of both the large enterprise and small business customer.
“We have to serve a very diverse set of needs in Europe,” said Kurt Glazemakers, Terremark‘s European chief technology officer. “We have designed our Infinistructure platform to overcome traditional data center limitations and to deliver capacity on demand with very strong economic benefits for the customer. Cisco’s Unified Computing System approach matches our vision of how IT infrastructure will need to evolve in order to gain even greater efficiencies and performance.”
We’re looking forward to working with more of the SP early adopters of our solution, and will be reporting on the lessons learned and associated best practices that are being applied to build sustainable business models.
Posted by Simon Aspinall at 10:18AM PST
Cisco Around the Web