Recent announcements show that communications service providers are busy beefing up their cloud efforts.
TIBCO Extends Reach of its Enterprise Social Network tibbr with KPN and Amazon Web Services
KPN’s Grip platform is squarely aimed at the multinational and large enterprise market. With Grip, CIOs can create a private cloud aggregation platform to serve up a multitude of private, public and hybrid cloud services with single sign-on. What caught our eyes was the mention of Grip and tibbr availability to 80,000 business customers. Availability does not equal take-up of course and we would love to hear from KPN customers that have successfully deployed or are thinking of deploying Grip at this point.
KPN adds registered mail, music services for SMEs
We wrote earlier about the need for KPN to step up its SMB cloud efforts. KPN Software Solutions has added two new cloud services for SMEs: Registered Mail and Tribe of Noise. KPN is certainly not the first with an in-house music solution for SMEs. Already in 2005 Telefonica offered its Solución ADSL Hilo Musical to Spanish SMEs.
Colt launches new range of simplified on-demand services for SMEs
Colt’s Ceano is a cloud aggregation platform for Colt partners, much like KPN’s Open Cloud Store and Copaco’s 2tcloud. Ceano is built on Colt’s acquisition of ThinkGrid in 2012. Ceano will serve Colt’s existing channel partners but Colt is also looking for new franchisers, distributors and VARs.
Ziggo Zakelijk
Last but not least, in stealth mode, Ziggo has quietly launched its SMB Cloud Guide. The “MKB Cloud Gids” is more of an affiliate approach to cloud, coupled with a landing page that serves up cloud apps, email, calendar and social networks, together with relevant news. Ziggo will get a kickback from sales of partner apps through this channel. The Cloud Guide is very PC centric and currently lacks mobile presence. Ziggo is committed to growing its B2B efforts, as its recent quarterly results and acquisition of Esprit show.
Finding new revenue streams, such as (re)selling cloud computing services is important to telcos as revenues from traditional voice and data services continue to be under pressure.
