As I get to the Fiumicino airport in Rome, I find out that my flight has been delayed by two hours. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that I just spent two days in this nice villa hotel near Rome discussing telecom with some pretty smart people in the industry, so the two-hour delay is only slightly annoying to me, as I have lots to ponder…
The event was NetEvents EMEA, October 5-6, which brought together press, analysts and vendors to discuss the challenges and opportunities around the Cloud. The presentations were interesting and thought-provoking and covered a gamut of subjects around the cloud. The journalists and the analysts raised important issues. Tata’s James Walker kicked off the event with his views on the Cloud and what a provider the size of Tata is doing to offer its customers the best the Cloud has to offer.
Gartner’s Ian Keene pondered that Cloud has passed its peak of expectations and it’s on its way to disappointment… So how much of it is hype and how much is real is not very clear at the moment. Ovum’s Peter Hall noted that only five percent of IT investment today is cloud-related, and that amount will increase to eight percent by 2015, putting things in perspective.
ECI’s Matthias Nass discussed the role of networking in the Cloud – the need for bandwidth in both wireline and wireless networks, and how operators need to figure out the business model for delivering Cloud services profitably. Not an easy task yet…
A who’s who from the telecom and IT world was there, and the one-on-one discussions were often lively and invigorating. Topics ranged from technology to regulation, from regional issues to globalization, from the role of vendors as bona fide partners to service providers as they try to figure out where to go and how to proceed. All agreed that we are not selling boxes anymore – that’s old telecom. Only together – service providers and vendors – can we figure out how to serve the end user with the latest services at a competitive price and still keep a healthy ROI. Otherwise we are just wasting our time…
Transcripts of the presentations and debate sessions can be found at: