Nelco Ltd(BSE: 504112), a TATA enterprise and headquartered in Mumbai, is a provider of VSAT Services, Integrated Security and Surveillance solutions in the Government, Defence and Enterprise sectors across India.

Cloud computing draws significant attention in the information technology community as it provides ubiquitous on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources with minimum management effort. It gains also more impact on the communication technology community and is currently discussed as an enabler for flexible, cost-efficient and more powerful mobile network implementations some characteristics as cloud-computing platforms, i.e., on-demand provisioning, virtualization, resource pooling, elasticity, service metering, and multi tenancy. However, these properties of cloud computing are key enablers for future mobile communication systems characterized by an ultra dense deployment of radio access points (RAPs) leading to severe multicell interference in combination with a significant increase of the number of access nodes and huge fluctuations of the rate requirements over time.

New initiatives of government of India – Make in India; Smart City is the main enabler & game changer for all telecom companies.

As per IDC the explosion of mobile applications and the tremendous rate of smartphone adoption is revolutionizing the mobile industry. Smartphone adoption will continue to increase as predicted by IDC that three display surfaces will become common on high end smartphones by 2020 driving new levels of interaction and utility.

Using cloud computing, telecom players can host software at a much lower cost than enterprise customers can themselves. Virtualization and provisioning software lets them efficiently allocate computing resources, thereby lowering their cost of hardware. Cloud service providers can locate facilities at telecommunication service provider’s data centre at low-cost locations, provisioning which cannot be duplicated by most enterprises.

Telecommunication Service provider has highly scalable and flexible infrastructure; A massively scalable engine allows building highly scalable services for users and partners and an infrastructure scale to meet the demand for peak loads and seasonal variations, business agility with rapid service deployment, Service provision with lower cost through the efficient use and management of resources.

Almost all major telecom service providers have spread across many locations they can offer Reliability of service with high availability. Since the workloads can be spread across many facilities, and even across clouds, redundant instances of applications can be used to avoid downtime and increase the availability. In addition, data distribution strategies can help address disaster (e.g., earthquake, tsunami, flooding) recovery and business continuity issues. Accelerate service innovation, Service providers can set up an application service hosting platform, integrated with various services and network capability, to accelerate service innovation, especially for mobile internet services.

In my opinion the only way to effectively engage more subscribers is by leveraging the vast amount of data available to service providers in order to understand customers and their preferences and by building a next generation marketing technology platform that enables real-time actions on those insights. For service providers that really grasp and implement the next levels of true customer engagement the rewards will be enormous as it puts them in the pole position for the customer oriented technology advancements that we will see over next 5 to 10years.

Mobile communication, accelerated developments in broadband networking, open source technologies, and Web 2.0 have made on-demand services more reliable and affordable. The current economic climate has forced service providers to take a hard look at their business models and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors. The old business model was about cost-per-bit, but in the new paradigm, telecom service providers realize they have to focus on what makes them stand out. Delivering cloud-based consumer and business-critical applications with solid service-level agreements (SLAs) will not only allow service providers to differentiate themselves but will maximize the value of the network while promoting a new business model.

Moving to a cloud-based platform poses challenges and concerns for service providers. Dealing with standards, security, performance, data compliance aligned with procedures and operations, and availability issues are just a few of the organizational and technical challenges they'll have to address to make cloud computing a true value proposition. Service providers can leverage their reputations and solid performances to offer reliable, comprehensive and secure cloud services.

Most importantly, telecommunication service providers can show value by strongly emphasizing that cloud computing allows enterprises to focus on other aspects of their businesses without having to concentrate resources on IT, server updates, and maintenance issues a win-win service offering for both service providers and their customers. And last but certainly not least, by ensuring the value of services delivered via cloud computing, service providers not only deliver business value to their users but increase and extend their sustainability.