Jean-Claude Geha, the company’s SVP for its international delivery unit, told Capacity in Munich today that the company is consulting with vendors that are cloud-ready to identify which will work in the international environment. Geha is one of Capacity Media’s speakers next week at the first Metro Connect Europe conference in Amsterdam.
He is also chairman of DT’s Pan-Net project, which is advanced in the process of cloudifying many of the products and services offered by its subsidiaries across Europe.
But how he is turning his attention to International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS), the group’s worldwide wholesale arm, Geha told Capacity in an interview at Huawei’s Operations Transformation Forum, which started in Munich today.
“We’re looking at the signalling platform, wholesale voice and roaming,” he said. “It’s a matter of having vendors with true cloudification capability.”
The company is taking a cautious approach, having learned lessons from its Pan-Net project. “We cloudify where it makes sense, in terms of customer experience, time to market and efficiency. It’s important to understand the technology well. We want to do what is doable and integratable.”
He said that the company has learned that it is best to use cloud for completely new services before starting to convert existing services to cloud operation. In his presentation to the conference he said that Pan-Net had started with “the easiest” services to introduce and was now moving to more complex offerings, such as cloud-based customer premises equipment. “We have 160 million unique users [of Pan-Net services],” he told the Munich conference.
There is no timescale yet for introducing cloud-based operations into ICSS, he told Capacity after his conference presentation.
