Is this a precursor to wider deployment of OSS products in the Cloud?
“Telcordia, a global leader in [blah blah etc.], announced today the availability of the Telcordia eLab, a new service that provides integrator partners with cloud-based access to the company's Next Generation OSS portfolio…”
Finally , a serious, all be it small, step towards new deployment architectures and business models for Big OSS. Telcordia’s ‘Next Generation’ software (Granite and Network Engineer) is now easily turn-on-and-off-able for those short term projects that you don’t want to be buying expensive hardware for.
Today, Telcordia eLab is only used for training, demo and testing purposes. But, presumably, there is no reason that, if this is successful, Telcordia couldn’t extend this service to commercial use of the OSS products. Training and testing is the natural first choice though.
And very clever of Telcordia to go for those low-hanging fruit first: It allows them to deliver their training services far quicker, with control over the installation, while reducing the overall total-cost of the activity.
How big is the jump to a full useable installation in the Cloud? Pretty big actually. With this first step Telcordia have technically proven their applications work in a virtual-machine based Cloud environment. But that does not necessarily include the large stack of admin, security and billing infrastructure that is required for a true SaaS offering in the cloud. More significant though, is the step their customers would have to take: Accepting that there are cost-of-ownership benefits to non-perpetual licenses and off-site deployments of business critical software. A leap of faith few telcos have made in the past.
