Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is looking at how the company could help communications service providers (CSPs) address upcoming challenges and demands. During this week’s HP Discover event in Frankfurt, Germany, HP announced two major products: a solution to help CSPs harness the cloud to create new revenue streams and another solution focused on helping telcos leverage big data to deliver new subscriber services. Big data and cloud computing have been top themes recently for telcos around the globe.
“Information optimization is among HP’s strategies for growth, as [HP president and CEO] Meg Whitman has already noted,” Valerie Logan, HP Enterprise Services’ vice president, strategy and portfolio, information management and analytics, told RCR Wireless News. In June, during the Las Vegas Discover event, Whitman said that HP’s strategy involves adding layers above its core business infrastructure such as: software (a core business extension), services (to add value to the core business) and solution offers. In addition, HP has also built horizontal lines to attend them and meet future demands of cloud, security and information automatization and optimization.
The first announced solution, entitled HP Telco Big Data and Analytics, aims to support CSPs’ ability to transform data collected from a variety of sources into actionable intelligence. HP’s goal is to help telcos manage, understand and act on massive amounts of information—known as big data—to deliver services to subscribers and improve their satisfaction levels.
The second product named HP Cloud Solutions for CSPs aims to help telecos generate new revenue streams and reduce costs by building and operating public cloud environments for their enterprise customers, and small and mid-sized business (SMB) customers. The product is built under the HP Converged Cloud and is set to enable CSPs to build and manage their public cloud environment.
HP wants to take advantage of carriers’ current need to expand their traditional business models and use information they already have to offer a better experience to their customers.
“CSPs must transform data into information, and they have lots of data, such as the services people have subscribed to, networking experience, context information and external data,” Jeff Edlund, HP Enterprise Services’ chief technologist, communications, media and entertainment, told RCR Wireless News.
He added that most value data was handled and owned by IT departments and now marketing is taking the lead role and pushing it forward. “It is a key transformation,” he said, noting that the industry is in the very early stages of understanding big data.
Another trend is for CSPs to take advantage of the infrastructure they already have to deliver cloud offers (read more about it on RCR Wireless’ mobile cloud feature report). Players such as Oracle have also gone in a similar direction as HP, unveiling mechanisms to help telcos in the process of transforming their business models to make new revenues.
“We have to make carriers understand what they have and what they can offer,” HP’s Edlund noted.
The easiest way is to offer infrastructure as a service, under a cloud-based model. The challenge, however, is to partner with software companies and add application layers to sell them as services. “In conversations we are having, we are encouraging carriers to become cloud service brokers,” said Edlund.
Several surveys have highlighted the advance of telecom providers into the cloud computing service market. Both Pyramid Research and Infonetics Research have released studies showing that carriers are embracing cloud computing as a key corporate strategy and that they are placed in a prime position to take advantage of that growing market.
