Cloud computing holds enormous potential for telecom service providers

With all the talk about cloud services, I thought I'd take another look at it, but this time from the perspective of the telecom providers. Telephony Online wrote a recent article outlining the benefits that cloud computing could give the telecom providers. The article points out that the providers are well positioned to take advantage of cloud computing, but also notes that they are behind in getting to the market with offerings and services.

Telephony Online sees big dollars from telecom providers because:

It increases the value of carrier networks in multiple ways and creates new roles (and revenues) for telecom service providers. At minimum, clouds will greatly increase network traffic and utilization and thus transport revenues. And in physically delivering cloud-based services, telecom carriers have an opportunity to extract two revenue streams from the same function, charging end users for a given level of service quality and, at the other end, charging cloud-based providers for service quality, too – an arrangement similar to that often discussed in the context of content delivery networks.

But that's not all telecom providers should do. Their existing infrastructure lends itself well to cloud services. Each software component offered in the cloud can be treated like a hosted application, which yields parallels in processing and performance.

"A service provider using cloud computing could build a supply-side architecture that matched up with the current application and service-logic trends emerging independently," Tom Nolle, president of CIMI, said in the article. "It's like a combination of two perfect storms."

With all this benefit for telecom providers in cloud computing, you should see more offerings coming soon.