We'll agree with industry observer Irwin Lazar on this -- "It's hard to have any discussion around IT these days without talking about the cloud, this mysterious blob that will seemingly suck up any and all IT resources into one giant singularity in the not-so-distant future."
Not that a good 85 percent of those throwing around the terminology could explain all that coherently exactly what the cloud is, and as Lazar says, why those responsible for UC planning within their organizations should care.
A good working definition of cloud computing would be a virtualized computing environment "in which applications run on hypervisors from vendors including Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft (News - Alert), and Vmware," Lazar says. So the question is: Why would you want to do this?
Companies who have done it find they save money on hardware, maintenance, cooling, power, and operational administration, since somebody else takes care of all that. Of course you still pay for it, but in one nice predictable sum every month, and without the ownership hassles.
As TMC (News - Alert) explained last year, "cloud telephony providers offer, in simple terms, voice applications that can be accessed over the Internet. So, for a service provider looking to offer their customers voice features they need not build it on their own. They can just incorporate one in to their own service offering and pay as they use it."
There's even something called "infrastructure as a service," or "IaaS" now. This is a "public" cloud offering from vendors such as Amazon, AT&T, GoGrid, Rackspace, and Verizon (News - Alert), Lazar explains, which "provide a hosted cloud service." You can move your applications into the public cloud, and don't have to buy your own hypervisor or servers.
If you're a UC planner, the cloud, as Lazar says, means you can move UC applications onto a virtualized infrastructure and probably find savings, flexibility, and resiliency: "Often the biggest complaint we hear from UC planners is the sheer volume of servers and interconnections between servers that they must maintain to deliver telecom services to their users."
TMC notes that "the key is the service is that it can be accessed. This is accomplished by SIP Trunking, which is a very basic form of VoIP peering. The interesting dimension with cloud telephony is that while it is essentially enabled by VoIP Peering (News - Alert) it also provides for an alternate destination for the session rather than a specific endpoint for the purposes of a full-duplex call."
Some vendors talk about the opportunities to reduce hardware investments by adopting carrier-grade telephony. Well, now cloud-based approaches can help companies do that - and you don't even need to replace your infrastructure, just get rid of it and let somebody else worry about it.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Kelly McGuire