By Phillip J. Britt

Cloud services are growing quickly as companies look for ways to minimize capital investments while still getting benefits from high-powered processing and scalable applications. The more services that move to the cloud, the more imperative it is for users to have top-tier OSS/BSS capabilities.

Telecom carriers need to make major changes to their data center strategies if they are to remain competitive in the face of strong offerings from independents, according to Ovum.

Mike Sapien, Ovum analyst and author of a new report, says carriers need to up their game if they are to remain major players and become significant providers of fast-growing cloud services.

“Data centers have traditionally been used by carriers for basic hosting and collocation purposes,” Sapien said. “Their role has taken on a new importance with the advent of cloud-based services and virtualization, and has changed to address this emerging demand. “Independent data center operators are winning business in this market and are building expertise.”

These data center operators are showcasing top systems and technologies, according to Sapien, who calls on carriers to focus on existing customer relationships and channels in order to meet this challenge.

Deutsche Telekom unit T-Systems is trying to meet this challenge through a simplified system to bring customers to the cloud. T-Systems customers can now use infrastructure services dynamically according to their requirements within minutes using a portal that T-Systems operates. These dynamic infrastructure services are billed on an hourly basis. The service is free for T-Systems customers during the pilot phase -- November 2010 through February 2011.

The offer combines the cloud approaches used in the public sector with those from the high-security business customer sector: Access controls, data security and protection,

rate of growth could still accelerate, according to Werner Vogels, chief technology officer for Amazon Web Services, who spoke about best practices for cloud migration at a November seminar in Chicago.

Vogels said that cloud services have yet to hit the sharp upward angle of the “hockey stick curve” in terms of adoption. Public cloud services are catching on in part because companies can quickly ramp up a technology support infrastructure without the need to first make a large capital investment in servers and applications. The downturn in the economy over the last few years has made the pay-as-you go model more popular than ever.

The pay-as-you go model enables users to avoid paying for much more capacity than they need, one of the problems with the practice of buying and running all of the technology in-house.