Orçun M. Özalp, Head of Emerging Business/Strategic Marketing, Turkcell is speaking in the Virtualisation & Cloud track on Day Three of the Broadband World Forum, taking place on the 22nd – 24th October 2013 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam. Ahead of the show we talk to him about the unique advantages that telcos can bring to the managed cloud services market.

Cloud is becoming increasingly important but why would you say are telcos the best fit to offer managed services to enterprise customers?

First of all, all of us agree on the ground rule of “no network, no cloud”, but there is a huge gap between IT outsourcing against IT as a service (cloud). Most customers are happy when they start using cloud services, but on the other hand, whenever a telco starts discussing this topic with enterprise customers they require you to supply their custom needs in term of SLAs and managed services. Telcos are still learning as they go on this journey and if they do not drive to the right destination they will reach the place where all unhappy outsourcing companies sit.

How do you feel you can best compete with the global cloud players that dominate the market?

Telcos can supply the bridge between the customer and cloud, which gives them a unique advantage against the economies of scale that the global players enjoy. The second most important topic in this game is the trust of the customer – they always prefer to touch and see their service providers face, whenever necessary. The rest is the value chain advantage of serving the cloud and providing an end-to-end-solution from one place. This gives the customer a

What do you need to do to optimise your network for cloud services compared to regulator voice and data for consumers?

The biggest opportunity in cloud is to provide WAN optimisations to speed up applications such as SAP and others to reach the data stored in the cloud. Using Riverbed and other vendor technologies as a part of MPLS VPN service creates a unique advantage in fixed-line services. Additionally, customers can benefit from not having to count end-user services such as online storage or mobile device usage for video conferencing against mobile internet usage.

The Broadband World Forum is taking place on the 22nd – 24th October 2013 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam. Click here to download a brochure for the event and here to register for a conference pass.

What are the key technologies that will have an impact on broadband development in the next couple of years?

On the consumer side it is absolutely video consumption. On the corporate side, SaaS usage will be the game changer for cloud (such as vertical applications like Pacs in healthcare, and big data intelligence tools across the sector.

What are you most looking forward to by attending the Broadband World Forum?

The Broadband World Forum is a unique place to learn real from life experiences in detail from all operators all over the world to benchmark our local expertise in order to help us make smart moves.