 We have known the classical terminologies of telcos or the telecom service providers We know internet service providers then we saw a merger of the telecom service providers and internet service providers But then we also saw the advent of the cloud service providers the cloud infrastructure Now apparently these are two parallel streams, which do not intermix But the telecommunication sector is seeing a downward slip in its revenues So there's a need for the telecommunication companies to survive revive and thrive For that we need to look at some reality We need to look at some options which the existing telecommunication service providers could consider and some strategies which I have taken from from a research group which specializes in strategizing for telecommunication sector. There was once a golden era known as the world gardens Then we saw the telecommunication companies Coming up with all possible strategies to retain their customers The telecommunication companies really had a rollicking time Sometimes only if they felt suitable They came up with their own suite of services if you remember The blackberry mobile phone with its own blackberry services the combining of cloud computing and Telecommunication infrastructure has now become a must Because the telecommunication service providers have the infrastructure They have the wires. They have the end terminal equipment the customer premises equipment the network attached Storages the exchanges the PBX's So there's a need to improve Some kind of presence that we call as online presentation to be known more to the users whether it's retail It's enterprise or corporate or it's a government To enable them or give them a feeling of empowerment To have better customer control who can configure build and Deploy their own solutions Two ready made options come into mind of course these are from the reference paper Which I have quoted but it's very intuitive first one is horizontal inclusion that is the telecommunication service providers Start immensely providing high volume solutions and Component compensation of their capabilities to different cloud service providers Now this particular strategy actually means that the telecommunication companies have to reach out to the cloud service providers by providing them tolerable and Configurable components of telecommunication as services now this is contrary to another approach which is known as the vertical segmentation vertical segmentation actually means you need to Go to the market yourself Not to the cloud service providers for specific small and medium enterprise solutions So vertical segmentation actually means that the telco itself Becomes the cloud Now this go to the market approach is great But we have to understand that the telecommunication service providers are rivaling with The OTT service providers and the cloud service providers. So it's not going to be that easy The strategies which have been defined for the cloud implementation of telcos can also be termed as technology as a service technology is a very subjective term and the very definition and Tweaking of this particular term is Going to be in control of the telecommunication service providers or the telcos So let's look at the strategies very briefly. We are going to look at the illustrations, which are going to make more sense the first one is Identify a strong anchor What is anchor? anchor is basically a place or A thing a device Which a customer is clinging to on hourly basis like a smartphone Daily basis like an email Weekly basis like probably online shopping service So if we think about moving the tele the telco services Around a strong anchor It actually means that the telcos are going to make more money But how are going to they do that? They need to come up with a computing infrastructure to create anchors of their own a Similar example that is going to make some sense could be like unified communication Gmail Yahoo Microsoft Mail.com services certain Daily shopping services The second strategy is develop and acquire the content Original content like content delivery networks like yahoo YouTube Facebook Twitter etc to earn position in the value chain It actually means that the content could be either all multimedia or it could be the artifacts or products like their own smartphones or their own Gadgets which are in the customer premises The third strategy is to realize that the cloud service providers are heavily reliant on the connectivity aspect so Caching that and building on this reality could probably help the telco to get into the cloud business and Lastly or as a fourth strategy think about localizing your presence and then being around online to monopolize the end-to-end service Provisioning process. Let's look at the four strategies. We've seen very briefly the anchoring is basically where a Customer is willingly and regularly Visiting so it means this is a good place for telecommunications service providers to provide cloud services Here it could be a crowdsourced place where the customer itself is Populating data for others for instance the the the Twitter feeds or the Facebook Posts etc. Now this anchoring is going to provide such a niche To the telecommunication service providers to to have a cloud of their own then we can think about developing the original content to stay relevant in the user community for that The telcos have to understand the entire value chain the cloud value chain which spans across connectivity services consultancy and customer There are subcategories to it for instance It could be storage platform application provisioning having Dedicated channels for instance having something similar to Educational channels as in YouTube infotainment channels as in YouTube Then having a billing mechanism of their own Now this is a place where the cloud service providers do not have the entire mechanism at their disposal because the billing as in AAA is the forte of the telcos Now this particular value chain if Truly understood and if a telco thinks about investing in a certain specific area Could allow telco to implement cloud as a third strategy As we can see that the overall cloud architecture is based on the IT infrastructure the end devices with the users but a heavy reliance on the connectivity Now this is where the telcos could get their own muscle by providing such an unflinching high quality broadband connectivity that helps the cloud service providers and Leave them with no option But either to join hands or probably the telcos taking over the cloud service providers Last but not the least the telcos could think Going absolutely big time that is They could understand The entire market space that is known as the go-to market Identify certain options that they have here. You can see starting from the sales channels to the products to the market segments We have so many options the telcos could think about investing in either of the sectors and making sure that the complete end-to-end process of service inception conception realization delivery user satisfaction billing retention is Not going anywhere else, but they take care of it as a whole Holistically, this is where the telcos could have a Probable survival and growth now the four strategies that we've seen come from a very beautiful report which was published by Research organization Arthur the little it was published back in 2013 by a team of four That is cloud from telcos either it is merely a business distraction or the actual survivability for the telcos The open action point making cloud a sustainable growth reality for telcos You may have a look at it. It's available online and it you'll find it very useful