TORONTO — Communication service providers who fail to move core, cloud-native applications to the public cloud risk losing competitive market position and millions of dollars from their bottom line, according to cloud software provider Optiva, which issued the warning in a news release ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona conference.
In its news release, Optiva cited information from Ovum’s February 2019 report Understanding the Business Value of Re-architecting Core Applications on the Public Cloud to support Optiva's position.
Ovum analyst Roy Illsley is quoted as saying: “To meet and exceed customers’ expectations, CSPs need to quickly introduce new services and then scale their infrastructure dynamically, upon demand. However, using traditional monolithic applications running on-premises made both these needs impossible because organizations have slow testing and release procedures and an overly complex and bureaucratic change procedure. This made changes slow, as organizations must perform capacity planning and purchase new hardware for the infrastructure, as well as deploy and test applications; these activities typically take months.”
Illsley continued: “The public cloud provides a perfect answer to both of these dilemmas; the public cloud providers have invested in the infrastructure, and the clients can choose to use as much or as little of it as they need. When this flexible infrastructure is combined with new cloud-native approaches to application development, the monolithic applications are decoupled and decomposed, and then containerized into sub-components, and the ability to rapidly develop and iterate changes to production is significantly improved. This capability has driven the growth of public cloud because organizations can move from concept to production quickly and scale any service to meet the demand.”
At Mobile World Congress Barcelona next week, Optiva executives will unveil the company’s new Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Simulator. The simulator allows operators to see, specific to their circumstances, the resources and revenues they are wasting with on-premises implementations of their core business support systems (BSS) applications, Optiva said in its news release. In the case of one Middle Eastern CSP, hosting its disaster recovery on the public cloud is leading to savings of 78% of its TCO, according to Optiva.
“CSPs are under such intense pressure to deliver cost savings that it is surprising that operators have been so slow to engage with the public cloud,” Danielle Royston, CEO of Optiva, said in the news release. “Private clouds, where operators still have to host and manage virtualized data in their own data centres, do not deliver on the promise of significant TCO reduction. Beyond some initial hardware savings and incrementally better operational capability, CSPs will not generate significant cost savings until they move significant workloads to the public cloud.”
Royston concluded: “With dozens of 5G network launches coming in 2019 and 2020, the volume of application data is set to expand exponentially. That means it is time for CSPs to do their due diligence on the public cloud and deliver what is probably one of the easiest and most fundamental moves available for the long-term health of their businesses. Telco leadership needs to start planning their move now, in 2019, and not wait for 2029.”
