Making the Impossible, Possible: The Impact of Grid Computing in Telecommunications

It’s not news to anyone that telecommunications carriers constantly are faced with new challenges and unrelenting cost pressures. Providers are beginning to turn to a technology that has become a de facto standard at the world’s largest financial institutions. Grid computing is making inroads in telco operators’ IT infrastructure plans – helping carriers reduce costs, accelerate time-to-market, better serve growing customer bases and extend competitive advantages. This technology serves as an IT model that enables the virtualization of a large number of computing resources on demand, no matter where they are located.

By creating a shared grid environment, telcos are able to create an agile and responsive infrastructure that automatically shares and manages systems resources – software, processors, storage and networks – across all applications within the enterprise. The virtual processing platform solves application performance constraints, while significantly boosting the utilization of existing infrastructure and bypassing the involvement of costly IT professionals. Grid computing provides a cost-effective alternative to satisfy the insatiable demand for more processing power – a requirement that traditionally has been answered by purchasing more system resources.

Not surprisingly, initial interest in grid computing within telecommunications has been focused around its potential to reduce costs. Grid enables firms to “do more with less.” By taking advantage of existing, underutilized resources, drastic savings can be achieved – not just by avoiding hardware purchases, but by dramatically reducing administration and support costs. Virtualization facilitates the move from high, fixed-cost models to low, variable-cost models.

While the cost-reduction opportunity always will be a key driver, there are several other reasons why grid computing is so beneficial to telco operators.

Billing Systems
According to Forrester Research, up to 15 percent of provisioned telco services go unbilled. Organizations deploy various applications, including fraud management, risk analytics and network assurance in an attempt to predict and combat revenue leakage. This approach helps, but it doesn’t provide a complete solution since IT still must find a way to tackle the large amounts of data involved and the computing power required to produce timely analysis and reports.

Billing systems represent obvious starting points for grid computing. Application virtualization can significantly improve performance for billing and statement generation, processes that are compute-intensive and starved for additional processing power.

Billing systems and rating engines are notorious for needing more processing resources to speed up the massive computational tasks associated with peak billing and statement generations related to real-time billing. If the billing lifecycle were to operate in a distributed computing environment, across a virtual pool of underutilized computing resources, compute- and process-intensive tasks would be transformed into tasks that could be completed in minutes. Time saved now can be used for projects that contribute or lead to revenue generation.

Business Intelligence and Analytics
While billing services become more complex, so does the amount of data from customer-facing applications and the challenge of processing it. In some cases, using grid has reduced processing time of business intelligence applications by as much as 90 percent. Users are able to process more applications over a less expensive infrastructure, while improving performance levels and productivity, accelerating “time-to-intelligence” and the ability to make faster and better-informed business decisions.

Product Development
With on-demand access to more compute power, firms are able to harness this capacity to deliver new products to market. For telco operators, there is a tremendous opportunity for new revenue generation by using the latest applications for intelligent, predictive modeling to help providers exploit data that has been available for years. Access to timely information leads to better decision support, which leads to increased response rates to subscribers’ needs. This type of modeling effectively requires large amounts of computing power, an insatiable demand that only can be delivered cost effectively with grid technology.

SOA Implementations
As the richness of functionality delivered to mobile and Internet service subscribers grows, the pressure for telcos’ IT infrastructure to meet this growth increases. As e-mail, video and other multimedia applications are added to cell phones and e-commerce channels, providers are embracing service-oriented architecture (SOA) to ensure the operations support systems can enable business growth and the IT infrastructures can handle the strain.

Virtual application infrastructure is an integral component of SOA strategies and can improve the performance and scalability of new services. The need for resilience and scalability is paramount, especially regarding customer-facing applications. Historically, most firms have provisioned applications based on peak loads. Not only does this create excess capacity and data center sprawl, it has introduced ongoing challenges around automation, management and more. Application virtualization software can better utilize these existing resources, while simplifying the complexity associated with managing several system resources.

Why Grid? Why Now?
The value proposition for grid computing is about achieving scale with simplicity and optimizing existing resources for business gain. Grid infrastructure software creates an on-demand operating environment that powers all types of business- and mission-critical applications. Major telecommunication carriers, including Telefonica, achieved dramatically improved performance, response times and service levels since implementing grid computing systems. From legacy applications to third-party vendor software to Web services, grid computing optimizes application performance across computing resources.

What is clear is that while grid adoption among telcos is in its early stages, the value grid computing and application virtualization bring to telco organizations can’t be ignored. Grid helps achieve scale, while drastically reducing costs. To successfully deploy a grid infrastructure, telco operators must form partnerships with vendors that have proven track records of virtualizing a breadth of applications to help dramatically improve performance, response time and service levels. For telco carriers, grid computing makes the impossible, possible.

 
Peter Lee is CEO of DataSynapse. He can be reached at peter.lee@datasynapse.com.

DataSynapse Inc. www.datasynapse.com

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