What can the telecom industry take from the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market? Quite a bit, according to
Forbes.com and Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato Networks. The IaaS market is dominated by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who provide hardware and software services for their customers to build their own applications. But rather than rely on third-parties, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google own all their own software.
"Take Amazon, for example," Kramer writes. "The company has developed its own software to provide services for storage, security, analytics, database, systems management, data warehousing, web caching, application services, mobile support and more. Amazon could have cut corners by simply leasing these same products from third-party companies that already had prominent products in the market (Oracle for a database and EMC for storage, for example), but Amazon intentionally developed its own components from scratch, despite the time-consuming investment in development."
Kramer believes there's a lesson here for telecom companies.
"There’s a dichotomy in the industry today between the traditional legacy carrier and the new 'software-defined' carrier," he says. "The legacy carrier is, essentially, a systems integrator that puts together a significant set of third-party hardware and software tools to create its network. A software-defined carrier follows the Amazon model and creates its own software stack, which is totally independent of the hardware it runs on.
"Legacy carriers have a very heavy infrastructure comprised of a hardware stack that includes routers, switches, firewalls, customer premise equipment (CPE), load balancers, web servers and more. These devices often come from different vendors, and so the carrier spends considerable time and effort to integrate the devices and their software to ensure they work together harmoniously. The carrier doesn’t control when new software is released for each device, and it must pay licensing fees to each of the third-party suppliers of the hardware and software. The fact is, there is a lot of process, overhead and complexity to this business model, which drives up costs that are passed on to customers. Moreover, complexity is anathema to security, availability and agility."