Telco and the Cloud: CIO Views From Around the World

When cloud first took center stage in the ICT industry, the telecoms industry spoke of how cloud-like services have been around for many years and that we have used clouds to depict the network and its activities pretty much since the 1980s. This is true, but today's cloud offerings of all flavors need to see the communications components integrated and managed along with all of the other ICT components in a series of solutions that match customer needs and expectations.

In this Insight, we take a look at how telcos are viewing cloud both from an internal telco infrastructure and management perspective, and from the perspective of the services that its customers ultimately consume in a cloud environment. There are a lot of moving parts that businesses and consumers face in the future ICT scenarios, so telcos have an opportunity to use their position in the emerging value chains to carve out a revenue stream in line with the relevance of the fundamental components that they provide. This Insight is based on many interactions with telco CXOs around the world and an aggregation of many cloud-related research streams across IDC.