Q&A: Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi on cloud computing

As written on Friday, Connected Planet hopes to give its readers food for thought with this discussion with Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, chairman & CEO of 2020 Venture Partners and newly added board member for Verecloud. Eslambolchi is a world-renowned visionary when it comes to transformation — and its evolution from a manual, human-oriented process to more of a machine-to-machine, automated one facilitated by cloud computing. He believes cloud computing is an essential component of transformation and is advocating for the use of “cloud service brokers” as a key to effectively deploying and managing cloud environments in such a way that service providers become “enablers” to many industries and value chain partners.

Connected Planet: Why is now the time to be talking about cloud computing and orchestration of services?

Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi: Five years ago, wireless was dominating and no one cared about cloud; companies just wanted eyeballs and revenue. While that’s still the case, you have a realization by operators that revenue will tap out in the next 12 to 18 months; after all, how many cell phones can you sell? When there are more cell phones than tooth brushes in the world, you will have pricing pressures that bring revenues down. So you have to be more than a pipe or port, and something like [infrastructure as a service] ultimately should come to be. Ahead of time, there has to be "pure re-engineering" in the same vein that GE or IBM went through it to become the powerhouses they are today. Operators have to change and transform their processes, and they have to do it with cloud to eliminate the cost infrastructure. They can talk of [long-term evolution] and 4G, but if they cannot manage the amount of data and end points now possible with intelligent networks and devices, then what’s the point?

CP: How is now really different than in the past two decades, which also called for a “sea change”?

HE: Intelligent networks and smart devices have moved the pendulum from where operators were in the '80s (with smart pipes in the core and dumb devices at the edge) and '90s (with dumb pipes and smart devices). Now, with intelligent networks and smart devices, they will have literally billions, if not tens of billions, of end points to manage. The [operations/business support systems] world then becomes so complex when you think of how private sectors and government are approaching smart grids, where you’ll be talking of maybe tens of billions of end points that will have to be managed and scaled. The technological challenges are of the same complexity as figuring out how to go from Earth to Mars.

In order to accommodate new services and different layers of services (some virtual and some physical), operators currently have to pump millions of dollars into back-end systems for fulfillment, ordering, provisioning, billing, [customer relationship management] and financials. Because so little in OSS/BSS has grown from ad hoc deployments, little has been standardized, so there is so much that can go wrong.

CP: Why are you promulgating “brokerage services”?

HE: If operators use brokerage services as the “fabric” through which they can orchestrate services across all of these end points, then they end up with sort of a middleware service (that acts as a trusted intermediary) that enables plug and play to accommodate changes as they occur. This opens up so many possibilities in what operators can do with utilities and health care and financial services companies, as well as automotive industries or others where apps for after-market devices require constant communication. When you have so many companies in the mix — each with its own service expectations and OSS/BSS, management systems and security, a cloud service broker can help tremendously with management in the cloud.