The bottom line for the telcos is that Cloud-based offerings are value-added services, where the value they add is added to the plumbing. In other words, their fundamental cultural perspective is to make more money with the telecommunications infrastructure. The problem with this perspective, however, is that it’s not the best way for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to think.
Those of us whose careers have centered on moving bits around can easily forget that telephone companies have been in existence since Alexander Graham Bell and his partners founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. For most of this century and a half of history, telecommunications has delivered plain old switched voice networks. The rise of mobile telephony, the Internet, and now the Cloud have each in turn shaken the telco world to its core. And yet, its history, and hence its culture, rest in the world of the Public Switched Telephone Network. In other words, once a phone company, always a phone company.