"The new UI is the social network"

It's evident that communication service providers (CSPs) are currently pondering on how to approach the changes in usage behavior that social networking, especially Facebook, is bringing. CSPs are concerned that Facebook and the likes will hurt their current revenue streams from voice, text messaging and other services. From a new ReadWriteWeb article:

It's a logical conclusion that Facebook will extend its messaging platform to voice and other communications. That realization is forcing the telecommunications providers to respond. Facebook is moving into telco territory.

 Whether CSPs manage to adapt to the ongoing challenges remains to be seen. However, becoming active participants and embracing cooperation opportunities with social networking providers seems to be the only viable long-term strategy in my opinion. CSPs should be in a very good position to enable and create added value to social networking services.

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Why are companies not moving to the Cloud?

Not all companies are willing to move to the Cloud for various reasons, some of the listed below

Security--customers want physical control of their data and still don't trust it off site.

Unapproachable--moving applications to the cloud seems complicated and abstract.

Proprietary--it's too hard to move data among systems.

Rearchitecting current applications is time-consuming and complicated.

All or nothing--you're either cloud or on-premise, but not both.

Do-it-yourself--support isn't a big priority for some cloud computing vendors.

These are taken from Rackspace CTO, John Engates, in his speech at the Web 2.0 Summit 

Furthermore

For his part, Engates defined cloud computing as being similar to hosting, but with much greater flexibility thanks to the use of virtualization to create and break down applications quickly. VMWare, Microsoft, and Amazon would probably all agree with that definition. Then they can get to work solving the other problems.

CloudComputingTopics 

Cloud computing on Gartner's 2011 technology list

Again, for 2011, cloud computing is on Gartner's top list of technologies to watch and invest in. See the Gartner slides

Each year, Gartner Research trots out a short list of top 10 technologies it believes enterprises should be investing in for the coming year. Check out last year's list here. With Gartner's Symposium in Orlando, Fla., just wrapped up, it's that time again to parse Gartner's prognostications for 2011. Cloud computing and social software have reigned the last few years, and so they do again for 2011.

 

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