US-listed computer company IBM has used its corporate venturing unit to help bring together a partnership of companies to offer telecoms companies a virtual range of services.
The IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform is a set of hardware, software and services to help phone operators deliver virtual computing services, including collaboration applications, customer relationship management services, data storage, back up and recovery, and industry-specific applications.
Telecom companies have struggled to offer cloud services with their expected levels of reliability and the IBM Service Delivery Manager software is a set of tools for automating the deployment, monitoring and management of cloud computing services from partners Broadsoft, Corent Technology, deCarta, Jamcracker, Juniper Networks, NetApp, Openet, Rightscale and Wavemaker.
IBM Venture Capital Group worked with six of these nine partners during their start-up phase, helping them to become IBM Business Partners and make their technologies enterprise-ready using its hardware and software.
Wendy Lung, partner of IBM Venture Capital Group, said: "This is a once in a generation opportunity for telecoms to tap into a new form of revenues through a cloud platform.
"Cloud services is going to explode and telecoms and service providers are well positioned in the consumer and enterprise space to be the single best provider in a potential $90bn market. IBM’s platform can create, manage and monetarise a telecom’s service with the best set of services. "
IBM has prospective customers in France Telecom’s Orange, Shanghai Telecom, SK Telecom, and Tellus.