Hi. While this blog is a part of Seed Catalyst’s website, I realised over the initial few weeks that a lot of you are first introduced to the firm via the blog rather than our home page.
So to introduce myself - I’m a business consultant working with early stage technology firms to help streamline their strategy and go-to-market approach and support them for fund raising.
With this blog, I aim to capture key market trends that I see in the industry, the ecosystem and cross-plays in some of the more interesting and upcoming sectors, as well as cover interesting companies that I meet.
I will also be addressing vexing and interesting valuation and deal/term-sheet structures that would be of interest to technology start-ups at various stages of their growth.
A very interesting new development from IBM: The firm has launched a new cloud services platform targeted at carriers and service providers which will enable them to offer cloud computing to their customers. The platform includes hardware, software and additional managed services.
Telecom operators providing cloud services are certainly in the news these days. A few days ago we covered the sector from the perspective of Vodafone, AT&T, France Telecom and BT. Now there’s news of Telecom Italia focusing on the sector to garner incremental 7-8% revenues from shared software and storage services.
Verizon has been tooting their major expansion into CAAS services since earlier this year. We are talking about new and expanded space in over 200 data centers connected to Verizon’s MPLS network to provide cloud based, converged solutions for network, application, content, security with additional managed professional services.
IBM’s proposition is interesting because of its positioning. According to the company, telecom operators can focus on their core offering but at the same time provide the integrated managed offering with a much faster deployment time. In addition, there is the possibility of additional services such as unified communications, field force management, collaboration and sales tracking.
Four years ago when the idea was broached between a telecom operator and IBM – we called it reselling – reselling IBM’s services along with the operator’s core infrastructure. After all, provisioning the infrastructure – network and data center – falls far more into the purview of the operator.
The new positioning does indeed sound very interesting. It’s a build up from telecom outsourcing deals like Bharti’s $750 million contract signed with IBM in 2004. Since then the contract value may have exceeded $2.5B both with the growth of the Indian market as well as Bharti’s expansion into Africa.
IBM has signed similar deals with various other players in emerging markets. However I believe the new platform can be targeted only at Tier-II and Tier-III operators or else MVNOs - players who choose not to manage their applications and services but would certainly like to offer their clients a more rounded portfolio offering.
