SingTel aims high for cloud growth

SingTel’s cloud service portfolio comprises on-demand computing resources, on-demand connectivity, on-demand managed services, plus SaaS solutions, which include office productivity, finance and accounting, human resources, sales and marketing, and supply chain management.

Alvin Kok, SingTel Business’ head of infocomm services, said the carrier has more than 800 businesses and 150,000 business users subscribing to its cloud services today. "Demand for our cloud services has accelerated over the last three years. We aim to grow our cloud services with a CAGR of around 50-70% over the next three years," he said.

SaaS continued to gain traction among the small and medium businesses (SMBs) in Singapore. "We are expecting this momentum to carry on in the area of Infrastructure-as-a-service for both SMB and MNCs," Kok said. "In the next three to five years, SingTel will focus and continue our thrust to become Asia’s best and largest one-stop ICT experience provider," Kok said.

In an excerpted interview with Asia Cloud Forum, Kok describes SingTel’s cloud service deployment for the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games, and advised businesses the key questions to ask before they adopt cloud services.

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Asia Cloud Forum: Describe one of your company’s most successful customer deployments of cloud services.

Alvin Kok: SingTel was the official data center infrastructure partner of the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games (YOG), the world’s first games for the youth. We provided secured virtual data center services to drive key applications such as games and results management, internet applications, email services and Web hosting for the successfully concluded Games.

SingTel’s virtual data center services allowed the Games organizers to deploy and scale up primary and secondary data centers rapidly, without the need to purchase, configure, and maintain physical infrastructure.

SingTel also provided a Web-based social networking application and a multi-language online chat platform to help athletes and officials keep in touch with one another, and to stay abreast of the latest results.

Finally, SingTel also provided disaster recovery and business continuity services -- including network and infrastructure diversity -- as well as 24/7 systems monitoring to ensure optimum performance and security.

“The Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games was the most complex IT project for a sporting event ever undertaken in Singapore to date.” Lim Bee Kwan, director of technology, Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee. (Source: Telecomasia.net)

How Telcos Can Contend with Cloud-based Computing

“We’re going to move the center of our digital life to the cloud,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said recently when launching iCloud and joining the mushroom of cloud services driving the next big step in the growth of the digital economy.

It’s become clear that cloud services will have a profound impact on every business. All of the ingredients for rapid take-off are now in place as smart phones and tablets rapidly proliferate, networks expand and services go virtual. You’d think that would make telecom operators smile – but actually, many are crying in their beer over the investment needed to cope with the massive growth of information coming just when their traditional high-margin voice and messaging services are declining. With five out of every six people on the planet having a phone, subscriber growth is slowing – while competition is rising and new services are going ‘over the top,’ delivering cost, not revenue.

Communications services are now following Moore’s Law, which originally described the doubling of computer power and halving of its price every two years. But just as Intel made a fortune out of that law through innovation and economies of scale, so can communications companies if they get smart.

There are more than 1,000 telecom operators worldwide, each with their own geographic footprint. After years of regulators pushing network competition, basic economics is now making market consolidation inevitable. As we’ve seen in the U.S., telcos everywhere are merging, sharing infrastructure and joining forces to leverage buyer power. Those who don’t get it will be left in the digital slow lane.

But network economics aren’t the only issue for operators. While telcos have billions of customers and strong brands, those strengths are offset by the growth of smart phones, tablets and digital services. Making calls and sending texts are just a small part of the growing digital mix. Increasingly, the consumer is seeing Android or Apple as their telecom brand. Buy a Kindle and the network is bundled – you see Amazon, not AT&T.

So where does that leave the telcos? Margins squeezed, costs rising rapidly, brands dumbed down and stock prices unexciting. But this $1.5 trillion industry still generates cash faster than a printing press. And while it’s easy to be gloomy, there’s plenty of life in the digital dog yet. But the dog needs to wake up fast and start barking.

To succeed, telcos have to move in two simultaneous directions. They have to look inward, rapidly exploiting economies of scale and making major shifts in operational efficiency. And if they want to avoid purely becoming a wholesale ‘behind the scenes’ player, they also have to simultaneously look outward to the market and strengthen their brands, their customers and their products.

The digital economy works by simply and cheaply exploiting a truly global marketplace – not just billions of people but trillions of devices. Cost and reach will drive this consolidation with a few, bold operators becoming very large, multi-geography carriers providing the 'central nervous system' of that economy with ubiquitous, fast, reliable communications backed by security, authentication and services like payment handling, billing and customer care. Despite the best efforts of net neutrality dreamers, we will see the emergence of different levels of service at different prices for those people who are prepared to pay for it.

But what is the role for communications players in developing digital services to ride across that infrastructure and leverage their customer bases and brands? Outrunning Amazon, Facebook and Google is not an easy task, so what position should they take?

The answer is fairly simple. Phone companies enable billions of conversations every day, but they don’t do the talking. The digital economy is going to be about trillions of commercial transactions every day from downloading your newspaper to your car telling the repair shop that it needs more oil. The role of the digital telco should be the same enabling role; not trying to invent all the services but providing an easy-to-use, go-to-market platform for huge numbers of digital service partners.

To do that, telcos need to see digital service providers as their partners, not the enemy. They have to learn how to bundle those services into appealing packages and see both the end user and the digital service provider as customers. Above all they have to think globally and figure out how to provide cloud-based services anywhere, anytime.

Operators cooperate every day in the phone business – calls reach billions of customers seamlessly and everyone gets paid because internationally agreed standards allow many piece parts to be federated into one seamless end-to-end service. A global digital marketplace requires the same standards, openness and transparency or it just won’t work. Remember pre-Internet email systems or SMS where you could only send a message to someone on the same system? Only the nerds used them.

Defining those standards is pretty straightforward, provided there is willingness to do it, but right now too many players have their heads down and think that being different gives them an advantage. They differentiate on the wrong thing: open up a digital marketplace and everyone makes money; make it closed and only a few platform players like Google and Apple will play.

Nobody owes the telcos a living, but with a vibrant, forward-looking industry, the economic and human benefits of communications – now reaching almost everyone on the planet – will seem to be just the first baby step in the development of the global digital marketplace. But it must be open, it must be innovative, and it must get a move on.
(Source: Keith Willetts, Chairman, TM Forum )