For any business out in the real world to succeed, it needs to do three things well:  

1. Find a supply of knowledge, materials and resources that help transform innovations and ideas into an offering to their customers (product or service),   
2. Manage a channel that can locate and interact with people and organizations willing to pay for that offering (customers), and   
3. Run an operations infrastructure that can efficiently deliver the product or service to the customer.

Vendors – Ericsson included – have long seen the wisdom of making it as easy (read: low cost and low risk) for developers to find the information and tools they need in transforming their “supply” into marketable offerings.  And  it seems that every month that passes brings with it announcements of new “app stores” providing channels to tempt developers with the potential of other client platforms – or even to compete with Apple on the iPhone and iPod!  However, supply and channels are not the main topic of this column.  Today we shall focus on item 3) above, operations infrastructure.

In a broad sense, many companies these days depend on the Internet as a key infrastructure element on which they operate their business.  Web 2.0 principles and Software-as-a-Service greatly reduce the complexity of writing code and reduce the investment in hardware and software required to run an application.  But a recent arrival on the Internet scene is taking these trends even further with interesting consequences for developers: Cloud Computing, where the basic resources of a platform itself are provided over the Internet:  processing, storage and network bandwidth. 

How does this impact developers? 

1. The initial capital outlay for equipment can be spent on software development instead, lowering the total cost of launching a new service.  As a consequence, for the same investment more services can be developed and marketed.   
2. Automatic scalability: as very little or a lot of resources can be easily made available to run the application, the infrastructure needed can start small and be scaled up as traffic increases.     
3. The application does not need to be optimized to handle the physical limitations of the developer’s on-site resources.    
4. Since the same environment is used in all cases it is not necessary for applications to be recoded for changes in platform.   
5. Cloud providers often have higher bandwidth and lower latency to popular web service providers providing a more efficient basis for mash-ups.   
6. Cloud providers offer advanced provisioning, management tools, data mining and analytics packages that would be beyond the means of smaller developers.   
7. Some Cloud providers even have extensive business support capabilities such as subscriber authentication, charging, billing, and more, providing even the smallest developer the opportunity to engage in “full service businesses”.

There are more ways Cloud Computing impacts developers, but the above should provide the base for me to close this column with a basic idea and a question. 

Idea:  The global PSTN (fixed AND mobile) could be considered a “communications cloud”, and as such has a potential fit with the concepts of Cloud Computing.  (Yes, I will address the issue of APIs and communications service providers in a future column!) Communications cloud functions include not only voice, messaging and video, but also identity, presence, location, file transfer, charging, group lists, data synchronization, etc.

Question:  What do you think of the communications cloud concept? And what functions do you think should be included in the communications cloud?  Please let us know!

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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author, and in no way represent Ericsson AB's official or implied position on the issues discussed.