Reader Forum: Why OpenStack is the fabric for carriers’ cloud efforts

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Earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress 2014 event much of the buzz surrounded wireless carriers’ efforts to provide cloud-based services. It was generally agreed that these efforts were not just strategically important, but inevitable. Much discussion took place around how best to develop these services, and one word continued to pop up in these conversations: OpenStack.
In a sense, MWC 2014 was OpenStack’s coming out party to the wireless industry. Many at the conference were exploring its potential benefits, drawn by the promise of a flexible solution to help build public and private clouds. For example, Huawei invited Jonathan Byce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, to speak at their event at the show.
The discussions are taking place as the wireless industry faces a number of challenges. According to a recent report by Deloitte, smartphone and tablet purchases are set to plateau over the next few years; as a result, carriers are looking to data as the next major revenue generator. That in itself is a challenge, however, because as data usage continues to skyrocket, carriers are engaging in seemingly endless debates about how to manage it while maintaining a healthy return on investment.
To maintain that healthy ROI, carriers must be able to provide additional services that focus on data, while still reducing costs. This is why the cloud is so important, and why OpenStack has entered the conversation in a major way.
The open and cost-effective cloud
Carriers are looking to offer new services that will appeal to their subscribers, but they want to do so at lower cost. Normally, this would be a tricky proposition. But the cloud – and OpenStack in particular – makes it extremely viable.
Actually, the first step for companies that want to explore a cost-effective cloud option is not to look at software services, but hardware. Organizations are rapidly moving past the days when proprietary hardware was the standard within their IT departments. Increasingly, many companies, including wireless carriers, are exploring the possibilities that lie within commoditized hardware – piecing together different components from various vendors that work seamlessly together. The components generally tend to be more cost-effective, and organizations do not have to be locked into a single hardware vendor.
An open source solution like OpenStack fits very well with the trend toward commoditization. It is highly scalable and is designed to work with any IT infrastructure. Because it is open source, it allows carriers to build cloud services cost-effectively.
At the same time, it has massive industry support by more than 200 established companies. It’s not something that was built in a garage, but a major initiative that is making the efficient development of public and private clouds a very attainable goal, and wireless companies are beginning to take notice of this momentum.
Growth in the wireless world
And yet, discussions about OpenStack in the wireless industry inevitably lead back to a single thread: because
OpenStack is so new, there’s a general misunderstanding of what it is.
Part of that is likely due to the fact that “what it is” is being constantly redefined. Like any open source project, OpenStack is continually evolving and being updated by one of the world’s foremost development communities; like a chameleon, it is frequently adjusting, though we believe always for the better.
It’s also quickly maturing, with adoption within the wireless industry growing at a fast pace. OpenStack is currently being tested by many major telecommunications providers and industry players (including companies such as Verizon Communications, Alcatel-Lucent and others), which are using it to develop their content delivery networks. Over the course of the next year, plans call for new features, specific to the wireless industry, to be incorporated into core OpenStack services.
Calls for public and private cloud standardization
Like many organizations that are looking to leverage cloud services both internally and with their customers, wireless carriers are faced with the challenge of building both public and private clouds. Again, these companies are looking to become more efficient, reduce costs, and break down siloes. As a result, the idea of using different solutions to build public or private clouds is likely not very appealing, as that goes against the continuity organizations are striving for. Calls for standardization on OpenStack distributions across public and private clouds have begun to appear to circumvent this problem.
This standardization will ultimately be dictated by the efforts of the vendors that support OpenStack. It’s critical for these vendors to be able to provide a significant ecosystem, complete with a large ecosystem of partnerships with telecommunications companies and independent service providers. It’s also important for vendors to share a commitment to innovation and passion for the power of open source technology. In the true spirit of open source, they must also come together and share a common goal for OpenStack to ultimately become the future fabric that sews together wireless carriers’ plans for the cloud.
By now, wireless carriers are no doubt used to the twists and turns that the road to the cloud has thrown at them. But they are now also seeking a straighter, simpler, and more cost-effective path. For them, OpenStack offers a clear route towards monetization of data, the implementation of public and private cloud services, and the chance to reduce costs. It’s a journey well worth exploring.
As the global leader for virtualization at Red Hat, Radhesh Balakrishnan is responsible for Red Hat’s virtualization business including driving strategy, product management and product marketing for products and technologies including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat OpenStack. Balakrishnan has more than 17 years of experience in the IT industry across various enterprise technologies. Prior to joining Red Hat, Balakrishnan was with Microsoft for 14 years where he held various product management and product marketing roles across Windows Azure, System Center, Windows Server, Windows Storage Server, Exchange Server and Windows desktop products and technologies.