Cloudbursting & Sunshine: Day Two @ Connexions2011’s Leadership Conference
Posted on Fri, Oct 21, 2011 @ 01:11 PM
By Dave Connolly, Marketing Communications at Sonus Networks
The sun finally made an appearance at Connexions2011 during a day when everyone wanted to talk about clouds.
On an idyllic morning, leaders from telecom providers around the world settled into the grand Country Club Ballroom to hear Korea Telecom’s Senior Executive VP and COO Hong-jin Kim talk about the amazing transformation underway at his company. Likening his role in the company to that of a hammer, Mr. Kim explained how KT had made the transformation from a staid telco company to one of the country’s most recognized and profitable brands by fearlessly rebuilding the company’s image, culture and services. At the core of that change is KT’s Cloud Communications Center, which has allowed them to move beyond voice into multimedia using a cloud-based architecture rather than more costly, traditional network models.
KT’s story segued perfectly into the next presentation from Joe Weinman, HP’s worldwide lead for communications, media and entertainment business solutions and founder of Cloudonomics. Possessed of an appreciably dry sense of humor for someone who spends most of his time with his head in the clouds, Joe dedicated the first half of his presentation to bursting some of the myths and hype around cloud computing. Then he explained how the cloud’s ability to cost-effectively scale and handle capacity spikes made it a natural platform for the future of communications; a future, incidentally, that was not open simply to the Googles and Amazons of the world, but to today’s telco providers too.
Despite the lure of the lovely weather, many Connexions guests took advantage of the final day’s breakout sessions to enjoy lively panel discussions on topics like SBCs, DIAMETER, PBXs, Voice as a Service, SIP session evolution and IPX. While the sessions revealed that not everyone envisions the future in exactly the same way, all agreed that the road ahead for communications service providers is an exciting and transformative one.
As with any good discussion, we leave with more questions than answers:
- Can Voice as a Service become a PBX killer?
- Will HotSpot 2.0 drive the adoption of DIAMETER?
- How do service providers innovate around the trend of growing traffic and flattening revenues?
Although Connexions is over, the discussion goes on. If you have any opinions about the future of VaaS, DIAMETER, cloud computing or other topics, send us your comments and start a discussion here.
Hope to see you in the future at Connexions! And to all of our customers, guest speakers and industy panelists, thanks for making Connexions a great event.