By CommsDay International

The current industry buzz surrounding cloud services is too limited in its definition and does not match the variety of services that are already delivered under a ‘cloud’ model to global enterprises, says AT&T’s cloud computing expert.

According to Joe Weinman, AT&T vice president for strategic solution sales and author of several articles on cloud computing, the definition for cloud services should be expanded to take into account the scope of enterprise services.

Read the full transcript of our interview with Joe Weinman

“Some people say cloud is IT services delivered across the Internet into a browser. I think that is an overly limited definition of cloud, in fact, it doesn’t represent the use case for most of the enterprises going forward in terms of ways in which they will use the cloud,” Weinman said. “First of all, we think one of the big use cases for enterprise for cloud services is not accessing over the Internet, but accessing through their VPN networks, so their data centre IT resources can burst into the cloud. That is not going to be done over the Internet. So there’s this myth that has been congregated by consumer service providers and our focus, of course, is on the enterprise.”

As such, Weinman has come up with his own definition of the characteristics that should define a cloud service.

“My definition of cloud is: ‘Common’, ‘Location-independent’, ‘Online’, ‘Utility’ that is available ‘on-Demand’ – that makes Cloud into a nice acronym,” he said. “By ‘Common’, I mean a shared resource that is statistically multiplexed across multiple customers and applications. Secondly, ‘Location independence’ is key – it shouldn’t matter where the user is, or where the cloud service is. If you use Gmail as an example, you don’t need to know where the data centre is and you should be able to use it anywhere in the world you want to. It’s ‘Online’ means two things – it is accessible over a network and by online it also means it is available, so high availability is key – you need a fall back plan for network access as well as the behind the scene architecture. It’s a ‘Utility’ in terms of the sense that it provides value, but also in terms of usage sensitive pricing based on resources used or other metric of usage. And lastly, it has to be ‘on-Demand’, so resources should be dynamically allocated.”

Under this definition, traditional service industries like power utilities, car rentals, hotels and so on, as well as “classic network services” such as “analogue voice, or VoIP, or data access and transport services” can all be categorised as cloud services, he said, adding that AT&T is already offering an extensive list of cloud services through its managed services portfolio. “Virtually any enterprise application we will offer in the cloud as a managed application.”
From this perspective, Weinman asserts that AT&T is not only ‘very much so in cloud services,’ but is one of the leaders in the field.

“I would claim that, with both the industry definition of cloud as well as with my broader definition of cloud, that not only are we in the cloud business, I would claim that we are the number one cloud provider globally for the enterprise,” he said. “Now, as far as consumer services, there are already vendors there and they are trying to move into the enterprise. But AT&T is what I called an integrated company, and there aren’t many of those. There are companies that are good at networking. There are companies who are good at hosting.”
GOING TO 40GBPS: One of the key competitive advantages for AT&T in cloud services is its ability to integrate its global network with its data centre facilities across all major regions, as well as its experience in serving global enterprises.

“I believe that being an integrated provider is absolutely key for reasons that have to do with cost and performance, especially if we look at the current, emerging generation of Web applications. For example, if you considered video over the Web, latency is absolutely key. Ajax application – same thing – you’ve got 150 to 185 millisecond maximum time budget, round trip, including server time, to be able to deliver that. So you can’t afford extra hops to go offnet to a third party provider and extra hops back,” he said. “So we have created this incredible infrastructure that ties together the world’s largest global network – we carry more IP traffic than anybody – 16.5 Petabytes per day, and growing, 88 subsea cable systems, 880,000 route miles of fibre – an as you know every route mile can be multiple fibre pairs, and anyone of those fibres can carry up to 80 service channels, which use to be 2.5Gbps, then they were 10Gbps and now they are 40Gbps – we have been buying the majority of the 40Gbps (OC-768) line cards manufactured in the world – so we know we are ahead of anyone in terms of those deployments.”

“We combine cloud computing, whether it is infrastructure, platform, or applications services that we have on the footprint, and couple it with the network, coupled with enterprise sales capability, the ability to operate at scale, high availability, and the enterprise SLAs. Without being overly arrogant, the consumer-grade services have a different approach to service roll out and availability – everything is in beta, possibility still now even after five years. Beta use to mean something – this is a step on the road to testing before we provide a quality product that we will stand behind. Beta now is just a disclaimer – if it doesn’t work then too bad, you are on your own. And you know as well as I do the recent outages in a storage services that lasted for days, and a mail service that went down. Our customers don’t live with that, they don’t accept that. In the global enterprises that we serve, it’s three 9s, four 9s, or five 9s availability.”

The article was first published in CommsDay International