Innovative Business Models: Bharti-Airtel

Bharti-Airtel of India continues to innovate on their business models, recently outsourcing mobile value added services to Comviva.  As you read through this article, one paragraph captures my attention:

Airtel’s IT contract with IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) works on a revenue-sharing basis, while the operator’s network outsourcing contracts with Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) and Nokia Siemens Networks introduced a radical financial arrangement whereby Airtel pays for network capacity usage (priced per erlang), and not for the network infrastructure.

Bharti is not paying for the network infrastructure, they are not even leasing it, they are paying based on actual usage.

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Ericsson & Cloud Computing

Ericsson usually does not figure in the Cloud Computing conversations and blogs  – at least the ones that I have been following (and I checked, they are not part of the supporters in the Cloud Manifesto project).  However I think there may be a case to be made that Ericsson may be in an excellent position to offer Cloud Computing services – may be as managed services which they excel at. How did I arrive at

Being a part of Cisco’s Service Provider group I regularly track  news on Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Network (NSN)  and the first bit of information that was lodged in my mind was an article in the Technology section of NYTimes titled “Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Are Managing Just Fine“.  To quote from the article:

Ericsson manages all or parts of the networks of 230 mobile operators with a total 225 million customers.

It is significant revenue for Ericsson earning them $1.7 billion last year from managing the mobile networks.  With this bit of information fresh in my mind, I ended up last night attending a presentation by Brad Anderson on Erlang at the Atlanta AWSome meetup last night.

Brad gave an introduction to Erlang and the history of its development with Ericsson.  His point that Erland is extremely well-suited for building Cloud Computing platforms and from his slide titled “The Three Biggies”, here are the reasons why Erlang is ideal for Cloud Computing:

• Massively Concurrent
• Seamlessly Distributed
• Fault Tolerant

The slides from an earlier presentation by Brad can be found here which make a good case on “Why Erlang?”. They also talk about how Erlang is catching up with major social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.  Erlang, as I learnt, has been around since 1990 and used actively by Ericsson on their Telephone Infrastructure unit and augmented by the Open Telecom Plaform (OTP).  And guess what Erlang is Open Source!

It is difficult to tell how much of Ericsson equipment and how much of the Erlang based technology is being used to manage the mobile networks but it is certainly interesting to note that the combination of a technology expertise (programming platform/langauge) in Erlang and their massive experience in managing networks and operations would be very useful in providing Cloud Computing Services.

The real question is does really think of itself to in a position to provide Cloud Computing services?