Cloud computing has successfully embraced the convenience and speed of the retail sector. It allows you to deliver immediate utility to your customers, satisfying any requirements they have on a day-by-day basis, while enabling you to drive additional revenue from your existing customers.
Contrast this with the way that products are delivered in the wholesale data and ISP world and the landscape could not look more different. The delivery of network components is traditionally complex, expensive and requires significant interaction across your technology teams, often using a myriad of third-party organisations.
With convenient product delivery readily available for service providers’ customers, surely the wholesale sector should be adopting the retail model? Why should it not be easy to buy a circuit between two data centres or rapidly deploy applications across a network? The simple answer is: it should be.
Giving service providers access to retail tools will undoubtedly change the market for the better. As data-hungry services continue to be rolled out, it is becoming more important for providers to respond quickly and scale capacity to support customer needs. The challenge for service providers is to increase scalability and uptime while constraining costs.
The key enabler for this change lies in the automation of network services. By giving service providers the ability to control their connectivity, you are giving them the ability to bring new services online instantly, while scaling bandwidth in response to changing business needs with near-instant deployment, all of which helps them drive revenue and acquire new customers. Then there are the service benefits. Automation also helps companies maintain high levels of service by reducing error levels from manual tasks.
With such compelling benefits, the question remains – why isn’t automation at the heart of service providers’ products? To some extent it can be argued that the industry has not wanted to relinquish its control, because traditional carrier margins are derived from capturing customer traffic, whereas retail-like control allows customers to run the carrier network in the most beneficial way for them.
Allegro Networks is a new generation of carrier that has launched a pioneering platform called SNAP, which delivers automation and retail delivery to the market, and is the first carrier to deliver complete control of wholesale connectivity.
Automation offers a cost-effective way to leverage capacity as a business commodity – a way for service providers to offer seemingly limitless capacity to their customers while lowering the relative costs of providing it.
Best of all, revenue is generated when provisioning happens. You can deliver orders on receipt, to a predictable cost structure and on a reliable platform, thanks to automation. You can also win additional business, based on the fact that the UK’s data centres are all within reach at the touch of a button.
The proposition is undoubtedly transformative, so bring on the revolution.
