As A Service

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

As A Service

We have seen UC as a service, software as a service, Infrastructure and Platforms as a service, Desktop and even Disaster Recovery as a Service. What is next?

WAN as a Service seems to be popping up as the next synonym for dynamic bandwidth or SDN (software defined network). It is the name for SD-WAN or the replacement for MPLS. It seems WAN optimization software wasn't taking hold, so we jumped over it.

Where we are now is the point where the plumbers of the bandwidth pipe - cablecos, ILECs, L3 Zayo and Cogent - have to come up with a way to be more than a dumb pipe provider. They tried going up the OSI stack, but new-comers seem to be beating them. So it was back to marketing the Layer 1-3 better. Hence, WAN as a service.

The cablecos are long on Ethernet. Big, cheap pipes are the answer to what ails a business. Even Cogent believes that. We'll see.

On the upper layer of the OSI stack, lies the other side of as a service world. SAAS, UCaaS, DaaS -- but all of that is really just product sets. We took software from a disc to a container in the data center. We called it cloud services and offered it as a monthly charge. The only thing that changed was the delivery and the payment method.

Sure, you can access that app from anywhere you have a connection but more was needed.

The Key System was replaced by a Hosted PBX solution. But really what changed? Not much.

The whole idea of cloud was to change the way businesses did business. Enterprise class software and comms platforms were available to any business to look, feel and work like an Enterprise. Did we leverage that? Not yet.

The next wave - Cloud 2.0 if you will - will be about outcomes. It will be about BPI - business process improvement.

I am already seeing mission statements that read like this: "Bring technology solutions that deliver positive business outcomes in areas of sales, service, and operations efficiency." That is the promise of cloud. The deployment, delivery and implementation of these solutions have been less than stellar -- and may be a factor into the lack of penetration in the marketplace.

My readers have heard me evangelize about outcomes, integration and BPI for a while. The industry is starting to see that is where the money is. We will see how that works out.

Business-Process-as-a-Service - you heard it here first.



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