Mark Baker
on 30 September 2013
The telco business has long prided itself on providing dependable services all day every day. Today, dial tones generally survive earthquakes, hurricanes, wars and power cuts and that is testimony to the service quality telcos provide. This high level of service quality runs through a telco’s DNA, which gives their applications the renowned ‘telco-grade’ high quality, highly scalable and constant availability. But creating such a culture comes at a cost.
The standards are a result of the tightly controlled software used by telcos which have been tested over many years. Strict processes are employed to minimise the chance of failure of any item in the service, and robust backup or failover services are provided in the advent of failure. While this is essential to deliver failsafe services, it also creates a restrictive environment in which launching new services based on new technologies is severely hampered.
As a result, new technology businesses are out-maneuvering telcos by being able to offer services based on the latest development frameworks. These are put together using agile processes and pushed into production by super smart DevOps who have planned application architectures assuming failures will happen. Whether it is Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) platforms, a move towards IP based voice and data services, or mobile application delivery services that drive customer engagement and retention, startups and tech companies are all delivering strong solutions into the market and putting pressure on telcos to do the same.
The Telco Application Developer Summit in Bangkok, November 21st and 22nd, aims to try and accelerate the pace of new service delivery for telcos by enabling developers to discuss the benefits of DevOp and agile practises. With Ubuntu being at the centre of many of the recent innovations in the high tech space, be it OpenStack cloud, Platform As A Service (PAAS), Software Defined Networking (SDN) or public cloud computing, we are very excited to be a part of this conference. We will be in attendance and demonstrating technologies such as Juju, which enables services to be launched and scaled instantly. If you are involved in the delivery of application services for telcos you should check TADS out and maybe we will see you there.
