Synopsis
Telecoms' world of long-term information and communication infrastructure investments collide with the rapid lifecycles of digital services - in the living room, in offices, and in government. How will Cloud evolve over the next fifteen years? What are technology, product, service, and business innovations ahead of us? How are value chains going to change? And how can the fast-paced, on-demand world of Cloud be reconciled with the telecoms' long-term, steady-as-she-goes value creation goal? We interviewed 15 thought leaders of telecom vendors, clients, investors, partners, and competitors to find out about the Future of Cloud: Salesforce, Iterasi, Sofinnova, Intalio, NetService Ventures, Sun Microsystems, Aruba Networks, Cisco Systems, Google, GoGrid, VMWare, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NewBay, and the Federal CTO of the United States. Aneesh Chopra. Will telecoms have a role to play in the Future of Cloud, or will it be the traditional Web providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce who will dominate? Will telecoms providers be able to play in the services and applications space? What do our interviewees think a telecom could or should offer?The book mainly consists of the full length interviews to give our thought leaders an unedited voice on their visions and thoughts. However, to give some context of our inquiries, we added a brief introduction on the events that lead to a maturing of the Cloud ecosystem and show how reduced interaction costs - within companies as well as between companies - will lead to horizontalization of Cloud into six distinct business models. We give a five-year outlook on changes in telecoms' ecosystem. Using our interviews as a basis we were able to derive some longer term impacts for the coming fifteen years on new ways of doing business, the new role of devices, new ways of running and providing services, new standards, and what strategic options mature and emerging telecoms have.
