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Guest post by Jamie Geiken, Solutions Architect

Cloud markets have been projected to grow at astronomical rates for the past few years.  Cloud providers have been developing from all origins of the traditional information technology companies, each of them contracting bandwidth from a network provider.  AT&T is onboard with many cloud services, Sprint has launched converged cloud solutions, Verizon is buying cloud companies presumably all with an eye to the Forrester projected $214 billion cloud computing market by 2020.

Removing the middleman could become replaced with the middleman.  Telcos have the infrastructure, OSS/BSS processes and are the closest to the consumers’ on premise clients.  At the Cloud Connect Conference in Santa Clara, CA, in February 2012, NTT America CTO Doug Junkins said, “The cloud is not the cloud without the network”.

According to Information Week’s David Berlind, “CloudScaling co-founder and CTO Randy Bias was a bit more skeptical saying that the carriers are just ‘throwing spaghetti against a wall waiting to see what sticks.’” During one panel discussion on choosing cloud models, Bias claimed that the telcos don’t have the product management mentality needed to be successful in the IT space. “No one [at the telcos] owns this stuff,” said Bias. “There are tons of opportunities for carriers to service companies with open clouds and to use their natural assets, but they are largely ill-equipped. It’s just more of the central command and control that we’re used to seeing from carriers.”

Are Telco Service Providers the next public cloud giants and this is Ripe? Or do you think this is just Hype?

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